Perry Desmond (1936 - 1984) performer, prostitute, sailor, beautician, occult retailer, pastor.

Perry was born and raised in Louisiana. His father was a pilot on a Mississippi River boat who was frequently drunk. His mother beat him once when she came home early and found him dressed in her clothes, but his great-aunt Edna let him dress up in her room. He was subjected to homophobic bullying at school, even in front of teachers who took no notice.

When he reached puberty several of the other boys, who had been rude to him, volunteered him as the one who would be sexually passive.

At Louisiana State University he found his first gay friends, but was ejected for being gay. He found a lover in Baton Rouge until his mother interfered. He then went to Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now the University of Louisiana at Lafeyette) and found another lover before being kicked out for doing so. In New Orleans he became a waiter and a prostitute, and as a kept boy started wearing female clothing full time, until his mother interfered.

He then joined the US Navy where he was a nurse, and married a woman from high school. However he found himself unable to have sex with her. He then told the Navy doctors that he was a woman, and was discharged within a week.

He returned to waiting, and did his first drag show at the My-O-My Club on Lake Ponchatrain. He was recruited for the Jewel Box Review because his size allowed him to take over the costumes of one who had left. He quit the Revue when his father was in hospital.


After that he opened a beauty salon, but then performed in various drag clubs. An agent in New York named him ‘The South’s Most Beautiful Boy’. In 1958 he and 142 others were arrested at a big costume ball at the Manhattan Center in New York. At the same time he came down with jaundice.

One day on the street he met an old friend who was close to completing transition, and demanded the name of her doctor. Perry then started on hormones injections from Dr Ritter in New York (probably Dr Benito Rish) , and started electrolysis. She also bleached her hair. She had a nose job and silicone injections.

Once she had breasts she passed easily as a woman, and went back to a mix of hooking and running a beauty salon. She gave that up to be a kept woman, but after a year of two-timing her husband, left him for the other man, Wayne.

In 1968 her father died, and she bought male clothing to attend his funeral.

She opened a new beauty salon in a haunted ante-bellum house in New Orleans, and then became a self-taught astrologer, and did lots of drugs. Her business evolved into an occult shop called The Age of Aquarius. She had her fortune read two or three times every day and constantly recalculated her horoscope.

After seven years together, Wayne beat her up and took off. Perry consulted a witch who sold her a spell to get Wayne to return.

After ten years on hormones, she contacted Dr Murphy Seeling in New York to be castrated. Wayne returned to go with her, and while she was there she had facial silicone implants as well. Seeling’s operation resulted in a painful abscess.

The next time that Wayne took off, Perry attempted suicide. Afterwards she bailed him out of jail and took him to a rehabilitation ward. In that ward Wayne embraced Jesus. After he got out, Wayne would not live with Perry because that would be a sin. He kept sending Christian leaflets to Perry and tried to get Perry to go to his church.

Perry found herself a new younger lover, but after a year of conflict with Wayne the new lover left for a ‘real woman’. This was 1974. Then her mother died, and wished to remember Perry ‘as you were’.

After an abortive visit to Wayne’s church she read the literature he had been sending to her, and approached the Baptist Church next to the laundromat. The minister visited her at home, and she converted, and was persuaded that to God she was still a man.

Perry reverted to male clothing, and he became a minister, and a celebrity on the Christian circuit. He became a pioneer in the Exodus movement. He supported the Anita Bryant crusade. He died of a heart attack at age 48.

*Not the singer, Perry Desmond-Davies   

• Randy Hammer.  "Brother Perry Trades Satin for Tracts". Pensacola News Journal (Florida), Jul 3, 1976: 28.
• James E Adams. "Transsexual wants to be male again". St Louis Post-Dispatch, Oct 7, 1976: 57. 
• Lester Lee & Good News Gang. And such were some of you (1st Cor. 6:11) : introducing Perry Desmond and the Good News Gang. New Orleans: Good News 1976.
• Perry Desmond & Dr. R. L. Hymers. Perry: A Transformed Transsexual. Ironton, MO: Metamorphis Books, 137 pp1978. Impact Christian Books 133 pp 2004.
• April Kupfer.  " 'Tranformed transsexual' begins life as a man again".  The Orlando Sentinel, Mar 31, 1979: 25. 
• Robin Witt.  "Cal Expo Evangelist Perry Desmond calls himself 'Eunuch for the Lord' ".  The Sacramento Bee, Jun 30, 1979: 23. 
• Elizabeth Mehren.  "Ex-gay wants a Humility Week".  The Tribune (Oakland), Jul 1, 1979: 12.  
• Lenita Powers. "Former gay delivers message of salvation".  Reno Gazette-Journal, Oct 27, 1980: 17. 
• Keith Lawrence.  "Evangelist abandons trsnssexual lifestyle to preach gospel".  Messenger-Inquirer (Kentucky), May 8, 1982: 8. 
• Perry Desmond. “The Final Transformation”.  No longer available.

_________________________________________________

Both Drs Ritter and Seeling are obscure. I cannot find any other information about them, nor any other transsexuals who used their service.

At the end of the book Perry issues a blanket forgiveness to the homophobic bullies and other who made his life difficult. Surely even within Christianity, forgiveness should only follow repentance -- which does not seem to apply here. This is more serious than it sounds in my summary of Perry's life. He mentions two female impersonators who were his friends, and who were murdered in really horrible ways by homophobes. Are we to take it that he forgives these murderers too?

From the way that Perry chooses Dr Ritter we see that she is impulsive on making such a choice. Therefore it is not strange that she chose a church equally impulsively. This is a shame for there are churches that accept transsexuals, but they are not usually the one next to the laundromat. It is an enormous pity that Perry did not find a trans-positive church before changing back.

William Ernest Edwards (1874 – 1956) sheep shearer, barman, performer, bookie.

Marion Edwards was born to a Welsh-born blacksmith outside Melbourne. At 1896 she transitioned to William, giving the rational of earning more money. William acquired a horse and male clothing and headed for the bush, working on sheep stations. He learned to shoot, and to fight. Although only 5”4’ the work and exercise brought his weight up to 10st 4lb (65.3 kg).

On New Year’s Day 1900 Bill married a 30-year-old widow in a Catholic church, but they soon separated. In April 1905 he was arrested for burglary when found in a hotel at 3 am. He explained that he was trying to catch a prowler, but absconded to Queensland before his gender was outed. His wife who had put up £50 bail, was sentenced to one month’s gaol for his default.

In Queensland he worked in house painting, and as a barman. However an old associate outed him. In October 1906 Bill was arrested and returned to Melbourne as a celebrity. With the publicity, he performed as a sharpshooter at the Fitzroy cinema between film shows, and at the waxworks billed as 'The Far-famed Male Impersonator'. At his trial in November, he was found not guilty.

The police tried to make him live as a woman, but he would not. He also published his memoirs, with photographs of himself in both male and in female garb. He also claimed to have worked as a female impersonator entertaining troops in South Africa during the Boer War and to have delivered horses to India.

In 1927, he was working as pony trainer. In the 1930s, he worked in hotels, iron foundries and factories, and as a bookie. He was listed on the electoral roll as a dyer. Later in life neighbours described him as an ‘old gentleman’, although apparently most of them knew his original gender.

He finally entered the Mount Royal Geriatric Home in Melbourne, where they forced him to wear women’s clothes.

In 1984 he was the subject of a play, In Male Attire.

• Marion Bill Edwards. Life and Adventures of Marion-Bill-Edwards. Melbourne 1907.
• Mimi Colligan, 'Edwards, Marion (Bill) (1874 - 1956)', Australian Dictionary of Biography, Supplementary Volume, Melbourne University Press, 2005, pp 113-114. www.adb.online.anu.edu.au/biogs/AS10143b.htm.
• “Bill Edwards: Gender Rebel (1881-1956)”. Radical Tradition. www.takver.com/history/edwards.htm.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

The accounts in the ADB and Radical Tradition are contradictory in several details, including Edwards' birth year. I have taken from both accounts.

Ron Storme (1926 – 2000) performer, organizer.

Ron grew up in a working-class home in Richmond, west London. He started as a child dancer, and he then toured in the popular all-male drag reviews during the Second World War. He met his lover, George, in 1947.


To avoid the repression that accompanied the Coronation in 1953, he lived in Tunisia for some years where he made a living as a stripper and singer.

On return to London he worked in risqué shows including the Gaiety Box Revue fronted by Larry Grayson. He was skilled at costume making, and made outfits for many London drag-acts. He was often en femme at private parties, and out on the town – at a time when such off-stage behaviour was unheard of among female impersonators.

Ron and George became known for their parties at their home in Putney in the early 1960s which attracted name guests such as the spy Kim Philby, lesbian singing star Dusty Springfield and the gangsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray. Legend has it that the Krays suggested what turned into the drag balls at Porchester Hall which Ron organized with Jean Fredericks. After Jean’s death he organized events at the Tudor Lodge in Bow.

In 1980 Ron opened a nightclub, Club Travestie Extraordinaire, in Stepney. This became an east-end institution, attracting both gay and straight transies, and as it lasted into the 21^st century is arguably the UK’s longest lasting gay night spot. George died in 1981. Ron was an organizer and judge at the ‘Night of a Thousand Frocks’ in 1986 that evolved into the Alternate Miss London contest.

Ron continued at the club, always fabulously dressed, until he was taken ill in summer 2000. He died of liver cancer, age 74. The Alternate Miss London contest is now dedicated to him.

• Richard Smith. “Ron Storme”. The Guardian. Dec 2^nd, 2000. Online at: www.wayout-publishing.com/ronstormes/rstorme2.htm.
• Vicky Lee. “A tribute to Ron Storme”. The Tranny Guide. 9^th edition. 2001. Online at www.wayout-publishing.com/ronstormes/rstorme1.htm.
• www.wayout-publishing.com/ronstormes.        http://www.ronstormes.com/.

What happened to ... Agnes (1939 -).

Agnes (a pseudonym) grew up the youngest of four children in a Catholic working-class family. Her machinist father died when she was eight. The mother did semi-skilled work in an aircraft plant to raise the children.

From the age of twelve Agnes took her mother's post-hysterectomy estrogen pills and feminized her body. At 17 she was living as a woman. She was tested in Portland Oregon, and found to have XY chromosomes, and neither a uterus nor the hypothesized tumor that might produce estrogen.

In 1958 she was working as a typist for an insurance company, and had a boyfriend. His insistence on intercourse and marriage led to a series of quarrels, and she disclosed her details to him. The affair continued.

She was referred to Dr Robert Stoller at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center, and interviewed by him, Dr Alexander Rosen, a psychologist, and Harold Garfinkel, a sociologist interested in the way sex (gender as it would later be called) works in society.

Agnes was taken to be an example of testicular feminization syndrome. She refused to meet or be classified with any other trans person or any homosexuals. She was vigorously conventional (heteronormative) in her opinions on sexual matters. Agnes refused to discuss certain topics, and as she refused to let the doctors interview her family, this led to some suspicions being raised. Stoller and his colleagues did discuss whether she had taken external estrogens, but they decided that she was conventionally feminine, as opposed to the “caricature” and “hostility” found in transvestites and transsexuals, and therefore must be genuine.

She was recommended for surgery as an intersex patient, at a time when such surgery was regularly denied to transsexuals. Surgery was done in 1959 by a team of doctors including Elmer Belt. Stoller presented his findings at the 1963 International Psychoanalytic Congress in Stockholm; Garfinkel included an extensive chapter on Agnes in his pioneering 1967 book on Ethnomethodology.

Post-operative infection of and partial closure of her vagina, weight loss that led to a reduction in breast size, and unpredictable mood changes led to problems with her boyfriend.++However she subsequently married, and was accepted as a popular and attractive young woman.

In 1966 Agnes confessed to Stoller that she had indeed taken external estrogens. This did cause Stoller to doubt his own theories. He retracted his earlier findings at the 1968 International Psychoanalytic Congress in Copenhagen.  ++As stated by Stoller: "she began stealing Stilbestrol from her mother, who was taking it on prescription following a panhysterectomy. The child then began filling the prescription on her own, telling the pharmacist that she was picking up the hormone for her mother and paying for it with money taken from her mother's purse. She did not know what the effects would be, only that this was a female substance; she had no idea how much to take, but more or less tried to follow the amounts her mother took." (Stoller 1968: 135-6)

++Then for the first time Stoller was permitted to speak with Agnes' mother.   He found that mother and child had slept encurled until the child was eight.  The father worked nights, and was rarely seen.  The mother had, as a child, worn boys' clothes and played sports with boys as an equal.   However at age 15 when her breasts developed, she put aside her male clothes and activities, and acted feminine.  She married her first serious date.   Stoller notes that this was similar to the mother of Lance, the 'boy transvestite' who had come to the Clinic a few years earlier.

• A.D Schwabe, David H. Solomon, Robert J. Stoller & John P. Burnham. “Pubertal Feminization in a Genetic Male with Testicular Atrophy and Normal Urinary Gonadotropin”. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism. 22, 8 Aug 1962: 839-845.
• Harold Garfinkel and Robert Stoller. “Passing and the managed achievement of sex status in an ‘intersexed’ person”. Studies in Ethnomethodology. Prentice Hall, Inc 1967: 117-185. Online at: www.intersexualite.org/passing-is.html
• Leia Kaitlyn Armitage. “Truth, Falsity, and Schemas of Presentation: A Textual Analysis of Harold Garfinkel's Story of Agnes”. The Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality. 4, April 29, 2001. www.ejhs.org/volume4/agnes.htm.
• Joanne Meyerowitz. How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States. Cambridge, Ma, London: Harvard University Press. 363 pp 2002: 159-161.

++

• Robert Stoller. "Etiological Factors in Adult Male Tarnssexualism". Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity, Science House, 1968: 133-9.
• Richard Green. “Robert Stoller’s Sex and Gender: 40 Years on”. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 39, 2010: 1461-2.

_______________________________________

This is a really great story. The self-appointed experts and gatekeepers are outwitted by a 19-year old girl.

"Agnes" managed to keep her real name - the female one as well as her birth name - out of the press. Once she had finished at the UCLA Medical Center she disappeared from history. She will now be 69 80.

It is sad that she did not want to meet any other transsexuals. Her journey must have been very lonely.
I was put off by the conventionality of Agnes' opinions as reported by Garfinkel, but I had to remind myself that a) it was 1959 b) she is a pioneer in telling the doctors what they want to hear, and does not know just what will work.

Stoller - unlike Money especially - had the honesty to return to his professional peers and admit that he had been wrong.

There is nothing on Agnes in Lillian Faderman & Stuart Timmons, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians, which there should have been, but then the book also has nothing on Edward Wood either.

Cindy Filo (1969 - ) performer.

Cindy grew up in Samoa in a Seventh Day Adventist family, and became a fa’afafine, the traditional transgender role in Samoa. Like many modern fa’afafines, Cindy has adopted western morés and is much like a drag queen, although she lives as female, and is disapproved of by the elders for this reason.

By the age of 15 she was the first night-club female vocalist in Samoa. She had an affair with a member of the Australian High Commission, who was transferred back home, but he quit his job and returned to Samoa to be with her.

In 1989 Cindy toured New Zealand, was a great success and stayed until 1996 when she returned to Samoa and started her own cabaret show that became a must for every tourist. She was also crowned Miss My Girl and Miss South Pacific Beauty Queen.

In 1999 she went to the USA for a one-off show in Carson City, but the trip was expanded as a tour. In 2002 she won Sydney’s Poly Talent Quest. She specializes in impersonations of Tina Turner.

• Heather Croall (dir). Paradise Bent: Boys Will Be Girls in Samoa. Scr: Karin Altmann, with Cindy. Australia 51 mins 1999.
• “Cindy of Samoa as ‘Tina Turner’”. Tornado Management Limited. www.austinpowers.co.nz/legends/tina_turner.htm.
• "’I'm a woman with extras’ - Cindy of Samoa”. Gay NZ. www.gaynz.com/articles/publish/2/article_6074.php.

_____________________________________________________________________________________

I hope that no-one is still reading Margaret Mead on Samoa. She never learned the language, couldn't tell when when people where having her on, and never noticed the fa'afafines.

Richard Sharpe (1954 - 2009) dermatologist.

Richard and Karen were teenage sweethearts who married just three months after highschool.

Richard Sharpe became a Boston-area dermatologist, with a cosmetic dermatology business, and a chain of hair removal clinics, LaseHair. He also taught at Harvard Medical School.

A secretive cross-dresser, who had abused his wife for many years, he came out in 2000 after he murdered her after she had left him. He had been self-prescribing female hormones to himself. He pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, but was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In 2007 he was acquitted of attempting to hire a professional killer to eliminate the prosecutor who had sent him to jail.


In January 2009 he managed to kill himself in his cell by hanging a sheet from the upper bunk.




*Not the soldier in the Bernard Cornwell novels and the subsequent Carlton Films television series, nor the rugby player, nor the 18th-century politician.

• “Attorney: Doctor accused of killing wife was cross-dresser, drug-abuser”. Portsmouth Herald. July 20, 2000. www.seacoastonline.com/2000news/7_20_sb1.htm.
• Denise Lavoie. “Cross-dressing doctor sentenced to life in prison for killing wife”. Portsmouth Herald. Nov 30, 2001. www.seacoastonline.com/2001news/11_30_sb1.htm.
• Sam Handlin. “Cross-dressing millionaire doctor on trial for wife's murder”. Court TV Nov 8, 2001. www.courttv.com/trials/sharpe/background.html.
• John Glatt. Twisted : The Secret Desires and Bizarre Double Life of Dr. Richard Sharpe. St. Martins Press. 2003.
• John R. Ellement & Andrew Ryan. “Sharpe acquitted in slaying plot: Murderer accused of targeting DA”. The Boston Globe. Aug 24, 2007. www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/08/24/sharpe_acquitted_in_slaying_plot.

Diamond Lil and Maisie, performers.

Lil, who lived en femme, and Maisie, who dressed for the stage, were a gay couple who lived in Hackney, London, and performed as a drag duo at various East End venues, particularly the Royal Oak in Columbia Rd, Hackney, from the Second World War and into the 1960s.

Their story was turned into a radio play, Diamond, 2006, by Linda Wilkinson, chair of Amnesty International UK, which was in turn adapted as a stage play, with Dave Lynn as Lil.

• Linda Wilkinson. Watercress but no Sandwiches: 300 Years of the Columbia Road Area. London: Jesus Hospital Estate Residents Association, 2001.
• Christopher Sandford (dir). Diamond. Scr: Linda Wilkinson, with Dave Lynn as Diamond Lil, and John Barr as Maisie. The Kings Head Theatre 2006.