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

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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.)

Peter Kevin Langan (1959 - ) outlaw and Cherie Roberts (? - ).

Peter was the son of a US foreign aid official. He grew up in Saigon and Wheaton, Illinois. His father died when he was nine.

He dropped out in 10^th grade, and ran away. In 1974 he fled arrest and was shot in the leg. He was convicted of robbery and served five years.


He emerged as a white separatist. He converted to Mormonism, but later was ordained in a Ku Klux Klan affiliated church.

In 1992, he and a colleague robbed a Pizza Hut in Georgia, and he was arrested the next year. He faced a life sentence but the US Secret Service sprang him from jail to find his associate. Langan disappeared after six weeks.

He became Commander Pedro and with three confederates he became a neo-Nazi revolutionary. Imitating the 1991 film Point Break and the Andrew Macdonald (William Pierce) fascist novel The Turner Diaries, they robbed 22 small-town banks in 7 states wearing masks of US presidents and taking only what they found in the till. They called themselves the Aryan Republican Army and it has been said that they helped fund the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.

Langan also attended Crossdressers and Friends in Kansas City where he presented as Donna. There he met Cherie Roberts a ftm crossdresser who turned up in the final days of his trial and demanded to speak to her wife. Their story was dramatized as an episode of The Investigators television show in 2005.

*Cherie is not the female porn star. Peter is not the London and Los Angeles restaurateur, nor the orthopaedic surgeon cum painter.

• Richard Leiby. “The Saga of Pretty Boy Pedro: How a Wheaton Kid Became a Neo-Nazi Bank Robber, and One Confused Human Being”. The Washington Post Feb 13 1997. Online at: http://www.constitution.org/okc/jdt03-17.htm. 

Donna in prison (from book Women of San Quentin)

Phil Starr (1932 – 2005) performer.

Arthur James Fuller started in amateur dramatics. He became a drag performer as Phil Starr in the early1960s, appearing with Terri Dennis (Barry Chat) at pubs such as The Black Cap in north London and The Union Tavern in Camberwell. He built up a reputation for his patter and ad-libs.

With his lover, Perry, he ran the Two Brewers pub at Clapham Common where they presented nightly cabaret. Lily Savage appeared there when she was starting out.

Phil was a regular performer in music hall and adult pantomime, especially at the Brick Lane Music Hall.
 
He and Perry retired to Brighton where he ran Starr’s Hotel and Bar, and performed in nightclubs. He often teamed with Maisie Trollette (David Raven).

He also worked in Thailand to raise money for a children’s orphanage after the tsunami. He continued with his rather old-fashioned act with long shaggy-dog stories until two days before he died.

*Not the martial arts teacher.

• www.freewebs.com/violetbrator/philstarr.htm.

Princess Seraphina (16?? – 17??) servant.

John Cooper, a gentleman's servant. was active in the Molly houses in London in the 1720s, using the name, Princess Seraphina. He was a gay transvestite just at the period when people were beginning to conceive of such a role - to which they applied the label 'molly'.

Trumbach quotes some of Seraphina's contemporaries. One called her a Mollycull, 'one of the runners that carries messages between gentlemen ... going of sodomitical errands'. Another said that she had 'never heard she had any other name than the Princess Seraphina', and that she had 'seen him several times in women's clothes, she commonly used to wear a white gown and a scarlet cloak with her hair frizzled and curled all around her forehead; and then she would so flutter her fan and make such fine curtsies that you would not have known her from a woman: she takes great delight in balls and masquerades'.


However she sometimes dressed as a man. In 1732 John Cooper was the plaintiff in a court case in which he charged Thomas Gordon with forcing him to undress in Chelsea Fields in order to exchange his fine male clothes for those of Gordon. Gordon insisted that this was part of a deal in permitting Seraphina to bugger him.

• • Randolph Trumbach. "The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture”. In Martin Baumal Duberman, Martha Vicinus & George Chauncey, Jr (eds) Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. New York: New American Library 1989: 138-9.
  • Rictor Norton. “Princess Seraphina”. Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England. http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/seraphin.htm

Elizabeth Tudor (1533 - 1603) queen.

The original Elizabeth was the daughter of Henry Tudor (known as Henry VIII) and Anne Boleyn. When she was three, her mother was executed and Elizabeth was declared to be illegitimate.

When Elizabeth was nine (or perhaps twelve), the plague was raging in London and to avoid it she was sent to Overcourt, a manor house at Bisley, a small village in the Cotswolds. There she befriended a boy of about her own age. He was her nephew, although sometimes described as her cousin: an illegitimate boy fathered by Henry Fitzroy, who was an illegitimate son of Henry VIII. The boy had been sent to Bisley to conceal his existence. Elizabeth died of the fate she had been sent to Bisley to avoid. The servants were terrified to tell the tyrannous but distant Henry VIII, who was about to visit. The illegitimate nephew was pretty, of about the same age and, most important, he rather resembled Elizabeth. It was easy to pass him off as 'Elizabeth' for a visit of Henry who was certainly not affectionate and was rather in a hurry.

However having started the imposture it proved impossible to let it go. The embarrassment of the boy's existence meant that very few questions were asked about his disappearance. An alternate version says that the boy was from the local village and had not actually met Elizabeth.

The replacement Elizabeth became Queen of England, Ireland and France in 1559 after the deaths of her supposed half-brother Edward, and her half-sister Mary. She reigned until she died in 1603 at the age of 69.

She never married; she became bald later in life and wore wigs; she left explicit instructions that there should be no post-mortem on her body; she took suggestions that she was androgynous and made a legend out of them. At Tilbury in 1588 during the crisis of the Spanish Armada, Elizabeth spoke to her troops, saying: "I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a King".

In Bisley itself, for over three hundred years the May Queen was always a boy in Elizabethan female costume. In the 1860s, the Rev Thomas Keble, during renovations at Overcourt, found an old stone coffin containing a girl’s skeleton in Tudor clothing. He had the remains reburied nearby, but the locations is no longer known.

The story was researched and popularised by Bram Stoker, the theatre manager and author of Dracula, who published it in his book Famous Imposters, 1909. A friend of his came across the legend while looking for a house in the area. Stoker visited the manor house himself, and going over the story point by point, became convinced of it.

The standard biographies of Elizabeth do not bother to refute this thesis, they merely ignore it.

• Bram Stoker. Famous Imposters. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, New York: Sturgis & Walton, Company, 1910: chp X.
• C. J. Bulliet. Venus Castina: Famous Female Impersonators Celestial and Human. Mew York: Covici 308 pp 1928. New York: Bonanza Books. 1956: 179-184.
• Emi Wolters. “Ein Transvestit als Königin”. Das 3, Geschlect,5, May 1932: 16-25.
• Harry Ludlam. A Biography of Bram Stoker, Creator of Dracula. New English Library. p162. 1977
  
• Chris Hunt. The Bisley boy. London: Gay Men's Press. 1995. A fictionalization of the story.
• Bisley, Gloucestershire: History. http://www.bisleyonline.net/content/view/15/55/ The web page for the village of Bisley certainly retells the story.
• Yvonne Sinclair. The Bisley Boy. yvonnesinclair.co.uk/stories/The%20Bisley%20Boy.html London Transy organizer retells the tale. 
• Christopher Stevens.  "Is this proof the Virgin Queen was an imposter in drag? Shocking new theory about Elizabeth I unearthed in historic manuscripts".  The Daily Mail, 8 June 2013.  www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2337774/Is-proof-Virgin-Queen-imposter-drag-Shocking-new-theory-Elizabeth-I-unearthed-historic-manuscripts.html.

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People have different opinions whether Jackson, Blanchett, Mirren or Richardson was the best cinematic Elizabeth Tudor, but the most appropriate was Quentin Crisp in Orlando, 1992.

George Wilson (18??-18??) sailor.

Born in England, George Wilson adopted a male identity and went to sea, crossing the Atlantic several times.

In 1836 he was arrested in Baltimore for horse-stealing. The prison authorities, decided that he was a woman, and were quite appalled to find that he knew nothing of women's work - he could sew a button on his trousers, but he could not sew as a woman would.

The authorities decided that he should dress and behave as a woman, and declared him intransigent when - dressed in trousers, 'as muscular as a pugilist', tall and answering only to 'George' - he would not perform as a woman. For this they flogged him, they put him into solitary confinement, they put him on bread and water, they flogged him again and again.

*Not any of the cricketers or footballers, nor the Pittsburg mayor, nor the chemist.

• Julie Wheelwright. Amazons and Military Maids: Women who dressed as men in pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Pandora 1989: 86.

Hermann von Teschenberg (1866 - 1911) barrister, translator.

Hermann von Teschenberg trained as a barrister. He was connected to Austrian royalty, and entitled to be called Freiherr (Baron). He was described as charming everybody with his feminine gracefulness, and he said that he would rather have been a maid in service rather than a son of a Minister.

At the age of twenty he was observed kissing a soldier in the Wiener Prater and was obliged to leave the country. He went to England where he became an acquaintance of Oscar Wilde, and translated some of his work into German.

After Wilde's trial von Teschenberg lived for a while in Paris and then Berlin. He worked for homosexual rights and became part of the inner-circle of Magnus Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. He was one of very few openly out gays in Berlin, and was often engaged to speak on the topic. When Hirschfeld was writing his Transvestiten, von Teschenberg provided a photograph of himself in drag, to be printed with his full name (however the Lombardi-Nash 1991 English translation does not include pictures).

He remained a Catholic and attended Mass quite frequently. He died in Naples in 1911 from the effects of his addiction to cigarettes.

• Charlotte Wolff. Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait Of A Pioneer In Sexology Quartet Books. 1986:42,104-5, 228.
• Joseph Bristow. Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend. Ohio University Press. 448 pp 2009: 138-140.
• Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller. Mann für Mann : biographisches Lexikon zur Geschichte von Freundesliebe und mannmännlicher Sexualität im deutschen Sprachraum. Hamburg: MännerschwarmSkript, 1998: under “Teschenberg, Hermann von”.

EN.WIKIPEDIA