Bette Bourne (1939 - 2024) performer.

Peter Bourne was born in the east end of London. He studied at the central School of Speech and Drama in the 1960s, and subsequently toured with Ian McKellan doing Shakespeare. He also had small parts in the television series The Prisoner and The Avengers.

He then dropped out and became a Radical Feminist activist during the days of the Gay Liberation Front in the early 1970s. With a group of similar-minded radical drag queens he set up a squat in a disused film studio in Notting Hill.

When the New York gay cabaret group, Hot Peaches, played London in 1976, Bourne pestered them until he was taken into the troupe, and toured Europe with them. When they returned to New York, Bette, as he now was, was the main founder of Bloolips, the charity-shop drag review that kept going into the 1990s.

With the decline of Bloolips, Bette has found parts in more orthodox theatre. In 1989 he played with Regina Fong in Neil Bartlett’s Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep about 19^th-century artist Simeon Solomon. He was one of the three actors who portrayed La Zambinella in the 1990 theatre version of Balzac's Sarassine, and played a somewhat controversial role as the gay drag queen supporting hetero-sexuality in A Little Bit of Lippy, 1992. In 1999 he played Quentin Crisp in the stage version of Resident Alien, having visited Crisp in his New York apartment. He has also played The Nurse in an all-male production of Romeo and Juliet at the Globe Theatre. He was in the stage version of Mother Clap’s Molly House, which was directed by Mark Ravenhill, who in 2009 put on a version of Bette’s life, A Life in Three Acts, in Edinburgh.

Bette died at the age of 84

• Kris Kirk & Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press. 159pp 1984: 96-7, 102-3
• Rupert Smith. 'Straight theatre is all fake' The Guardian. Dec 5, 2005. http://arts.guardian.co.uk/features/story/0,11710,1657761,00.html
• Chris Bernard (dir). A Little Bit of Lippy. Scr: Martyn Hesford, with Bette Bourne as Venus Lamour. UK 75 mins 1992.
• Mark Ravenhill. “The fabulous life of Bette Bourne”. The Guardian. 23 August 2009. http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/aug/23/bette-bourne-mark-ravenhill. 

EN.Wikipedia    

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Obviously the term 'Radical Feminist" as it was used in London GLF in the early 1970s has a very different meaning from how it was used by Janice Raymond and her ilk.

Shi Pei Pu (1938 - 2009) opera dancer/singer, spy.

In 1964 France opened its first embassy in the People's Republic of China. On the staff was Bernard Boursicot (1944 - ) an accountant. His colleagues were aware that he was gay, but it was considered that in a closed society like that of Maoist China there would be no opportunity to meet men.

The Chinese secret service recruited Shi Pei Pu, a native of Kunming in Yunnan and a singer with the Beijing opera. He was also an actor and playwright and spoke French. Shi was a student of the master dancer Mei Lanfang and like Mei specialized in female roles.

It was arranged that Shi and the 20-year-old Boursicot would meet. The meeting extended into an affair, an affair that is muddied in retrospect. Boursicot never saw Shi Pei Pu as a woman and yet insisted in believing that she was a woman dressed as a man. At any rate she did produce a child, Shi Du Du, that was 'theirs'.

In 1970 Shi introduced him to a man named 'Kang'. Boursicot would have known that the head of the Chinese secret service was Kang Sheng, but it is highly unlikely that Kang himself, member of the Politburo and lover of Jiang Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong, would have been there. Faligot and Kauffer suggest that Kang's adoptive son, Yu Zhensan, was the intelligence officer involved. At any rate Yu was supervising the operation. The situation was made clear to Boursicot, and between 1970 and 1972 alone he handed over more than 150 confidential documents.

After an interval of five years outside China, Boursicot was transferred to the Mongolian People's Republic in 1977, and was able to resume his services for the Chinese. He transmitted to them the texts of numerous dispatches.

He was so useful that in 1982, a year after he had returned to Paris, the Chinese agreed to send Shi Pei Pu, and the 16-year-old son, to France to continue the romance. In September 1981 Li Shuang, a non-conformist artist, who had been having an affair with another French diplomat, the ex-militant Maoist, Emmanuel Bellefroid, was arrested and sent off for two years in a re-education camp. This despite an appeal from the French Minister for Overseas Trade.

Shi Pei Pu, now living with Boursicot, became well known in Parisian artistic circles for his traditional dance. However his affair with Boursicot could not go unnoticed. On 30 June 1983 Boursicot was summoned for questioning, and Shi Peipu on 3 July. They were both sentenced to six years' imprisonment. The French government were able to use this as a show of force against the Chinese concern about foreign opinion, and in November of that year Li Shuang was put on a plane for France.

Shi was pardoned in 1987. He stayed in Paris and performed as an opera singer. Shi and Boursicot spoke infrequently. Shi Du Du now has three sons of his own.

Bouriscot now lived for a longtime with a male partner, and was in a nursing home when informed of Shi’s death.

The affair has been turned into a successful play by David Henry Hwang called M. Butterfly. Hwang renamed the characters to Song Lilang and Rene Gallimard and made the story less plausible by make Gallimard middle-aged and hetero-sexually married. David Cronenberg filmed Hwang’s play in 1993 without any reference to Joyce Wadler’s book on the real story. Boursicot is a fan of the play, and co-operated fully with Wadler for her book.

• Roger Faligot & Remi Kauffer. Kang Sheng et les services secrets chinois. Paris: R. Laffont, 1987. English translation by Christine Donougher. The Chinese Secret Service. Headline 1989: 432,447,448,474.
• Joyce Wadler. “For the first time, the real-life models for Broadway's M. Butterfly tell of their very strange romance”. People Weekly. 8 August 1988.
• Joyce Wadler. Liaison: The Gripping Real Story of the Diplomat Spy and the Chinese Opera Star Whose Affair Inspired "M. Butterfly”. Bantam 1993.
• David Henry Hwang. M. Butterfly A play, written and performed in 1988.
• David Cronenberg (dir). M. Butterfly Scr: David Hwang based on his play, with Jeremy Irons as Rene Gallimard and John Lone as Song Liling. Canada 110 mins1993.
• “Shi Pei Pu”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Pei_Pu.
• “Bernard Boursicot”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Boursicot.

Jim Sinclair (1940 - ) neurodiversity activist.

Sinclair was born intersex and raised as a girl in Texas. She was also autistic and did not speak until aged 12, and then became very outspoken about not being a girl.

She was sent for intensive psychotherapy. By 14 he was accepted outside his family as a boy, and at 16 was evaluated by intersexuality ‘specialists’. He was put on testosterone injections until he objected that he did not want to be a male either.

Sinclair took the name Jim, and self-identifies as “"openly and proudly neuter, both physically and socially”. Jim does not reveal his genotype as that would assign gender.

Jim was one of the co-founders of the Autism Network International in 1992, and as the only one with an internet connection became the original co-ordinator. Sinclair gave an anti-cure presentation at the 1993 International Conference on Autism in Toronto, and later published it as “Don’t Mourn For Us”. He is a major activist in the neurodiversity movement.

• Jim Sinclair. “Don’t Mourn For Us”. The Edmonds Institute, 1993. www.edmonds-institute.org/dontmour.html.
• Jim Sinclair. “Self-Introduction to the Intersex Society of North America”. ISNA, 1997. Online at: web.archive.org/web/20080216054409/http://web.syr.edu/~jisincla/brief_bio.htm.
• Andrew Solomon. “The Autism Rights Movement”. New York Magazine. May 25, 2008. http://nymag.com/news/features/47225.
• “Jim Sinclair (activist)”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Sinclair_%28activist%29.
• www.jimsinclair.org.

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I suggest a reading of the Andrew Solomon article.  There are a lot of parallels between the transgender and the neurodiversity movements, including division over whether the condition should be removed from the DSM, whether the cause is cultural/social, biological or pollution (in their case vaccines), and whether the condition is a disease or an improvement on normality.

Liz Lyons (1919 - 1991) performer.

In the 1940s Rubin Elkins, in the northwest USA, became a raunchy female impersonator under the name Lee Leonard.   She performed at Finocchio’s and the Garden of Allah. 

++She took up with fellow performer Robin Raye.  They toured together, but did separate acts.  However in 1958 Raye married a female stripper and they drifted apart.

+Later using the name Liz Lyons, she became a woman in 1968 at the University of Minnesota Gender Clinic.

In the mid and late 1970s Liz put out x-rated LPs, such as Up Your Ass, Live at the Club Morocco, 1975, and Liz Lyons, Live,1979. Her later stage show often included a display that she was indeed female.

* Not the Lee Leonard, a radio/TV personality, nor Liz Lyons the social scientist nor the novelist.

• J.D. Doyle. “Liz Lyons, Aks Lee Leonard”. Queer Music Heritage.  www.queermusicheritage.com/drag-lyons.html.
• “Lee Leonard/Liz Lyons”. The Minor Luminaries. Dragstavaganza. www.blakstone.com/Dragstravaganza%20Site/Minor%20Luminaries.htm.

Jimmy Slater (1898 - 1998) impersonator.

Jimmy was raised in Yorkshire. He started performing with seaside concert parties just before the Great War, and served in the war doing much the same.

After the war he was part of Splinters, the ex-soldiers impersonation revue.He left before the first of the three Splinters films, 1929, 1931 and 1937,

He later had a solo career, mainly in the north of England. In addition to his drag show, he produced revues, seaside shows and pantomimes. He was still performing in the 1960s.

He also ran a costume supply business. He retired to Cleethorpes.









*Not the corporate raider, the trade unionist or the hockey player.

• Roger Baker, Peter Burton & Richard Smith. Drag: a History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts. Cassell, 1994: 188-9, 194.
• Trevira. “Jimmy Slater - a perfect lady”. Flickr. www.flickr.com/photos/trevira/sets/167864.
• J.D. Doyle. “Jimmy Slater. Queer Musical Heritage. www.queermusicheritage.com/f-slater-jimmy.html.

Barbra Amesbury (1948 – ) musician, film maker.

Bill Amesbury was born in Kirkland Lake, Ontario. He became a singer-songwriter who had several hit singles and albums in Canada and the UK in the 1970s. His biggest hit was “Virginia (Touch Me Like You Do)” in 1974. His 1976 LP Can You Feel It, has a song “A thrill’s a thrill”which contains:

“The gays are straight/

and the straights are queer/

and the bi's just call everybody dear. … I know a boy who growing tits,/

and, he swears -/

A thrill’s a thrill, even in paradise”.

 The song was also recorded by Long John Baldry and Marianne Faithful (in the latter case with slightly censored lyrics).

Bill transitioned and became Barbra in the early 1980s. She retired as a performer and became an arts patron with her partner Joan Chalmers, the Maclean-Hunter publishers heir. In 1994 they organized an exhibition re breast cancer survivors, and Barbra made a documentary film about the tour of the exhibition 1995-8.

In 2002, James Collins had a top-40 radio hit with his song about Barbra and the problems that friends have about talking about the pre-transition self.   Apparently this was done without either input or approval by Barbra.

In 2006/7 Barbra’s documentary The G8 is Coming was shown at several film festivals.

• Barbara Amesbury. Survivors in Search of a Voice. Toronto: Woodlawn Arts Foundation 60 pp 1995. Exhibition catalogue re breast cancer survivors.
• James Adams. “The Story Behind the Song About Bill”. The Globe and Mail. June 22, 2002. Online at www.queermusicheritage.us/aug2008ba.html.
• Monica C-L. “Are you a friend of Bill? Or Barbara?”. A Seat on the SOFFA. Sept 14, 2008. http://supersoffa.blogspot.com/2008/09/are-you-friend-of-bill-or-barbara.html. 

 EN.Wikipedia

Chiya Fujino (1962 - ) novelist.

Fujino was born in Fukuoka, Japan, and went to university at Chiba. In the 1980s he worked for a major publisher before transitioning to female, and becoming a published novelist.

She has been awarded three major Japanese literary prizes. Her first novel, Gogo no jikanwari (Afternoon Timetable), 1995, has a transsexual protagonist.  Her novel Natsu no Yakusoku (Promise of the Summer), 2000, which won the Akutagawa Prize was criticized by the Tokyo Governor as abnormal for containing gay characters.  This was met by outrage.

 EN.Wikipedia.