The greatest artist of the 20th century

One of the most colourful figures in the scene around transgender persons is the Marquis of Pubol, Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí Domènech, best known as Savador Dalí. The artist and filmmaker.

His 1929 film with Louis Buñuel, Un Chien Andalou, contains a character described as a 'hermaphrodite'.

He offered to do a painting of April Ashley as Hermaphroditos but she did not want to immortalized in her half-way status.

From the 1960s he was and remained a friend and mentor of Amanda Lear, and rumours say that he paid for her operation with Dr Burou in Casablanca in 1963. She lived with him and his wife for many years. Some say that her name = ‘a man’ + ‘dali’ or "L’amant Dali”.

In 1965 Mario Montez the New York underground film female impersonator made his iconic Andy Warhol film, Screen test Number 2. the one where he confronted about his gender and admits that he is a man, but he does so, he says, only because he is a woman. Savador Dalí was present and is in the film.

In the late 1970s he trained Manuela Trasobares Haro (who had transitioned at the age of 15) as an artist.

Also in the 1970s had his own set in New York.   Most famously he was a friend of International Chrysis, the New York drag celebrity, best known for her role in Sidney Lumet's 1990 film Q & A.  He appears in the 1992 documentary film about her life, Split: William to Chrysis: Portrait of a Drag Queen.    

Anthony Haden-Guest describes the scene.  Potassa de la Fayette "was often part of the entourage of Salvador Dalí. If any 'ism' ruled in Studio, it was voyeurism. Most went to see or be seen. Dalí, a veteran of the human gaze, would go with people he needed to impress. A man who liked a hectic sort of order, he would follow a routine, dining first —Trader Vic’s was a favorite spot—with his considerable retinue of regulars before going on to the club. 'There were always three or four transvestites,' says Roger de Cabrol, a designer and regular himself. “Potassa. There was
this French transvestite, very pretty, named Pascale."

Dalí was also seen at the GG Barnum Room with Ava Hollywood.

In the late 1970s, Dalí was close to the Brazilian 'trans diva', Yeda Brown. He introduced her to musicians and the press called her ‘the muse of Dalí’.

• Duncan Fallowell &April Ashley, April Ashley’s Odyssey, Jonathan Cape, 1982: 69.
• Anthony Haden-Guest. The Last Party: Studio 54, Disco, and the Culture of the Night. William Morrow, 1997: 113.
• Ian Gibson. The Shameful Life of Salvador Dalí. Faber and faber, 1997: chp 14.

IMDB(Screen Test #2)  

Trans Mirror(Yeda Brown)

ES.Wikipedia(Manuela Traspoares)

EN.Wikipedia(Split: Portrait of a Drag Queen)

Angela Douglas (1943 - 2007) musician, activist

TAO and Angela Douglas

Angela Douglas (1943 - 2007) musician, activist

History of TAO: part 1: to 1971. USAF, music, GLF

History of TAO: bibliography

History of TAO: Part 2: 1972-80. TAO in Miami Beach

History of TAO: Part 3: aftermath

Kimberley Elliot (1953 - 1980) TAO, Neo-American Church

More on Angela Douglas

In July 2019 a Gender Critical Reddit thread  linked to this 2007 posting.  Apparently some anti-trans women think that a letter, be it satirical or whatever, from 42 years ago, written by someone who died 12 years earlier, and who never worked well with other trans activists, is a relevant document in discussing trans activism today!!!!                         My Reply.

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Unlike some of the persons whom I have featured in this series, Angela Douglas had, before her recent death, been recently posting on the web, and has a new CD out. The last item may surprise those who have read the account of Angela Douglas either on Kay Brown's now defunct Transsexual, Transgender and Intersex History site, or in Joanne Meyerowitz: How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States, neither of which mentions her musical career.

As an exercise, I am going to write a sketch of Douglas taking facts only from Brown and Mayerowitz, and then again from Douglas' web postings. The two versions are radically different.

Brown and Mayerowitz version:
Born: Carl Czinki. A hippie and aspiring rock musician who came out as transgender in 1969. She became the radical transy leader in Transsexual Action Organization (TAO)--the major US transgender group other than Reed Erickson's EEF at that time-- in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and then in Florida. She emphasized the importance of working with both Women's Liberation and Gay Liberation groups. She deplored the medical model and pathologization of transgenderism, and called on the American Psychiatric Association to remove transsexuality from its list of mental disorders. She was antagonistic to the Erickson Education Foundation which she found patronizing and too close to the medical establishment. Satire that Douglas wrote about the exclusion of transies from the lesbian community was recycled misleadingly and out of context by Janice Raymond in The Transsexual Empire, and also by Catherine Millots in Horsex. She later won a lottery prize, obtained surgery, and moved back to Florida.

The contentious writing quoted in Raymond and Millots was originally published in Sister Aug-Sep 1977, p7. As quoted by Raymond p xvii it goes: "Free from the chains of menstruation and child-bearing, transsexual women are obviously far superior to Gennys in many ways .... Genetic women are becoming quite obsolete, which is obvious, and the future belongs to transsexual women. We know this and, and perhaps some of you suspect it. All you have left is your 'ability' to bear children, and in a world which will groan to feed 6 billion by the year 2000, that's a negative asset."


From Douglas's own postings we get a certainly different slant:

Born: Douglas Carl Czinki in Detroit in 1943 to Hungarian immigrants. Raised on US Air Force bases. He completed his education in Tokyo where he was in his first rock band. Served in the US Air Force. In the late 1960s, using the name Doug Delain, he briefly played guitar with Arthur Lee and Love, with Euphoria and then with Warren Zevon. He had a cameo as a pot smoker and did art work for the 1967 film The Trip. Provided his home for a Jimi Hendrix television special. His Cuban wife left him in 1967. Began transition in 1969. She ran TAO which had over 1000 members in 5 countries. She was frequently attacked, and was beaten unconscious 6 times. She dismisses the idea that the letter sent to Sister was satire, and has made comments that are homophobic, misogynist and anti-feminist. She has been an FBI informant since 1972. She had surgery courtesy of John Brown in 1977, which left her mutilated. She helped to get him arrested. She dissolved TAO in 1978. Douglas has lived as a man since 1982, homeless and celibate, except for two years after winning a lottery in 1991. The money ran out when he had a stroke. He also has diabetes. In 1998 he returned to performing as a man, Last Drop Douglas, and and issued a solo CD, Cosmo Alley, in 2003.

Emails and postings consulted:

Douglas Carl Czinki to Kay Brown- no date - included on Brown's site.  Archive. 

A.L. Douglas posting on Sympathy on Milli Vanilli Jul 7, 2000.
Angela Lynn Douglas posting on dev.greenspun.com November 10, 2002.
Angela Douglas 2 postings on "Transsexuals allowed in Olympics" Amorous Propensities May 21, 2004 and October 21, 2004.
A.L. posting on band family tree.com 5/28/2005.
Tanglehead posting on Messageboard for Love Fans 16/11/2005.
Angela Douglas posting on Arthur Lee Tribute June 27, 2006.
Angela Douglas (Tanglehead) posting on Yellow Swordfish>>Arthur Lee and Love 2006-08-26.
Angela Douglas posting on the Cindi Lauper web page. 14 March 2007.
Tanglehead posting on ufowatch no date.


Angela Douglas died in 2007.

Here is an obituary by Mark Hinson in the Tallahassee Democrat on August 24, 2007. It is no longer available on the original site:



Angela's ashes: Farewell to a wild pen pal

LET'S GO BLOG WILD: My mail box is a lot emptier now that self-described "notorious transsexual," rock musician, lottery-winner, lottery-squanderer and prolific letter-writer Angela Douglas has died.
Douglas, who lived in Sneads in Jackson County, died of complications from heart trouble earlier this month. She was 64. As she said in one of her last communiqués: "I am 64 and Paul McCartney doesn't care."
In the above photo are Stuttering John, left, from "The Howard Stern Show" and, right, Angela Douglas. The picture was taken in Panama City Beach, circa 2000.

When I was a young reporter in the '80s, Douglas used to phone me in the newsroom of the Tallahassee Democrat and launch into wild, rambling monologues that were part performance art and part paranoid fantasy. She was always convinced someone had stolen her life story.
When "Top Gun" became a monster box-office smash in 1986, Douglas wanted to sue Tom Cruise for pilfering her self-published autobiography "Triple Jeopardy" from 1982. (I don't remember many trannies flying fighter jets in that pic, unless Goose wasn't telling us something, do you?) Famous musicians such as Warren Zevon, she claimed, had stolen her songs without payment.
Mostly, I just let her vent. As I learned long ago in bartending class, you let the customer talk while you just wipe the bar with a rag and keep saying, "Yep, I know what you mean."
Getting flaky phone calls in a newsroom is nothing new. For a few months, a caller identifying himself as God would phone up to predict the day's weather. And, you know, most of the time he was more accurate than the professional meteorologists we paid to do the same job. (God says it's going to be hot this weekend, by the way.)
I was prepared to write Angela off as just another kook. But then I did a little research and found out she really had worked on the fringes of the music and movies industries in Los Angeles during the '60s and early '70s. She'd worked with Arthur Lee before he formed Love and really did know Zevon (in his starving-artist days). Jimi Hendrix may or may not have recorded one promo at her home in L.A. That house was also used as a set for Roger Corman's 1967 acid-dropping classic "The Trip" with Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.

Douglas started life as Carl Czinki - and played guitar under the name Doug Delain in the L.A. band called Euphoria - but decided to switch sexes in 1969. The transformation was complete by 1977, when Douglas had become an outspoken writer/journalist for the transgender community. This is the same time period she became convinced television and movie producers were stealing her life story.
I have no idea how or why Douglas ended up in rural Jackson County in the late '80s.She settled in dinky Grand Ridge near Sneads and lived in impoverished conditions. This made her very bitter and she often lashed out at gays and blacks when she called me with another rant.
When her phone calls from pay phones suddenly stopped, they were replaced by a stream of letters. I still have stacks of the things. Some are coherent, some are funny, some are hand-scrawled screeds that are impossible to read.
Then, in the summer of 1991, Douglas had a rare stroke of good fortune. She won $232,567 in the Fantasy Five lottery game. After taxes, the lottery cut her a check for $186,000.
In a newsletter published by the lottery, Douglas crowed that she was going to buy an electric guitar, a used red Corvette, tell everyone in Grand Ridge to kiss her you-know-what and move to Key West.
And that is exactly what she did.
A few months later, she was back in Jackson County living in poverty. Again. She'd found plenty of friends in Key West who were more than happy to help her spend her free money.

Occasionally, I'd get good news from Douglas. In 1997, she wrote a twisted little novelty song called "Andrew Cunanan" and it end up on Dr. Demento's nationally syndicated radio show. (She also penned parody tunes with titles such as "Ghost Eunuchs in the Sky.") In 2003, she released a CD called "Cosmo Alley" under the name Last Drop Douglas. She even played a few live shows at festivals around North Florida and drove to Panama City to meet Stuttering John from Howard Stern's radio show. Douglas both loved and hated Howard Stern.

Most of the Douglas letters, however, were depressing. Naturally, the FBI was after her. She railed against doctors (many of whom I knew personally in Marianna) who were allegedly conspiring against her by denying her treatment. Her surgery from the '60s and '70s had left her with many medical complications, which she discussed at length and I won't repeat. It wasn't pretty, I'll tell you that. I hope sexual-reassingment surgery has gotten a little better since the '60s.

Earlier this year, Douglas sent me a tape she'd recorded while she was in the hospital. It starts with the chilling intro: "This Angela Douglas and I am dying." The rest of the message is classic Douglas - nutty accusations, bold claims, too much personal information about her medical conditions, crazy tales of her musical past. All classic Angela.
As I listened to the tape, it suddenly dawned on me: "Hey, her life story really would make for an interesting movie or play. Wonder why anyone hasn't done it before?"

-----

PS The British actress Angela Douglas, whose first fame was in several Carry On films, is a different person.

PPS Kay Brown's page includes stories, "probably apocryphal" she says, about Douglas as a transactivist at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and at the Stonewall riot in 1969. These do seem implausible, and in writing the above, I have ignored them.


There was a British branch of TAO. Amazingly Stephen Whittle was involved in it. For details see p192-3 of Ekins & King The Transgender Phenomenon, 2006.


I certainly agree that someone should write a book about Angela Douglas and TAO.

Ella Zoyara (1840 - 1879) equestrian.

Born in St Louis, Omar Kingsley ran away to the circus when he was eight years old. He was trained in the dangerous trick-riding, and presented as a young woman. Ella toured Europe with the circus.

In Moscow, a Count, believing himself to be in love, offered a large sum of money to be introduced to her. In Italy the king, Victorio Emanuele II requested that she visit him. Ella did so but always accompanied by a female companion.

Back in America, Omar married Sallie Stickney, a fellow circus rider. In Manila, several military officers accused Ella of not being a woman after she had refused one of them. This resulted in a brawl and Ella and the circus director were thrown into jail. Ella's 'true' sex was then discovered.

Omar gave up his life as Ella to become a partner in the circus, but continued to give benefit performances. He died of smallpox in Bombay where he was giving such a performance.

• Hirschfeld, Magnus. Die Transvestiten; ein Untersuchung uber den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb: mit umfangreichem casuistischen und historischen Material. Berlin: Pulvermacher, 562, vi pp1910. English translation by Michael A Lombardi-Nash. Tranvestites: The Erotic urge to Crossdress. Buffalo: Prometheus Books. 424 pp 1991:344-5.

Woolworths, Windsors and cutting off cocks

Jimmy Donahue (1915-1966).  

Grandson of Frank Woolworth of the chain stores. A notorious and uninhibited queen who relied on his mother’s money to get him out of trouble, and keep him out of the courts.

Dressed as a nun, he had his chauffeur stop in the middle of a bridge and got out and squatted: two cars collided. He would dress as a female prostitute, or with pillows under his dress as grand society hostess Elsa Maxwell. He was often in drag at his mother’s parties. He did drag while entertaining his friend the homosexual New York Cardinal Francis Spellman.

In Italy, he stood on his hotel balcony, imitated Mussolini, and then pissed on the crowd below. He is rumoured to have killed one lover who had become inconvenient.

He is infamous for a party in New York in 1945 or 1946 where he invited US servicemen found in a gay bar. One of the service men – in a drunken stupor – either lost his cock as the guests attempted to shave his pubic area, or part of his ear as he was being passionately fucked. Either way Donahue’s mother paid him an enormous sum to keep it out of court.

In 1950 Donahue took up with the much older Wallis Simpson who was still married to Edward Windsor, Duke of Windsor, who had briefly been King of the British Empire in 1936. Their affair continued for four years while he financed the Windsors, and there was much speculation as to what Donahue and Simpson did with each other, although there are those who say that Donahue’s affair was actually with Edward, and that Wallis was acting as a beard.

• Charles Higham. The Duchess of Windsor: The Secret Life. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co. 482 pp 1988: 370-2, 394-5.
• Christopher Wilson. Dancing With The Devil: The Windsors and Jimmy Donahue. Griffin 288 pp 2002.

PS Wallis Simpson(1895 - 1986) is said to have been an XY woman, with Androgen-Insentivity Syndrome (AIS).

Royal Command Performances by gender impersonators

The UK Royal Command Performances (later called Royal Variety Performances) are a tradition dating from 1912. The proceeds are donated to a showbiz charity.

• Prior to their inauguration, Dan Leno had been invited to perform for the King in 1901, but he felt that etiquette prevented him from appearing dressed as a woman, and so he did the whole act in mufti.
• The first of the actual Royal Command Performances was in 1912 and starred, among others, Vesta Tilley. She did her usual male impersonation act. Queen Mary is said to have so embarrassed, by the sight of a woman in trousers, that she turned her back for the duration of the act.
• If we are to believe the autobiography of Rae Boubon, the famous pansy performer, he did a Royal Command Performance for King Edward, however this fact does not seem to check out.
• An American drag performer, Delbert Hill, part of the US Air Force Special Services.who had been performing in a grass skirt and coconut-shell bra as "Dirty Gertie from Bizerti" and kept performing during air-raids, was on the bill in 1944. This is before he went AWOL and hid as Donna Delbert, "America's Outstanding Lady Magician and the Only Lady Fire Eater in the World".
• The 1947 performance include Bobbie Kimber, one of very few female ventriloquists. This was before her self-outing as a male in 1952.
  
• Since then Danny La Rue has done at least 3 Royal Command Performances, and today it is no big deal at all.

The drag queen who killed Rasputin and sued MGM

Felix Felixovich Yusupov (1887 – 1967).

Alternatively transliterated as Feliks Iusupov. Also known as Feliks Graf Sumarrokow-Elston.

Yusupov was descended via his mother from the fabulously wealthy Yusupovs, a family of Tartar origins. As he describes in his autobiography, he spent time with gypsy bands and in drag. He claims that he was cruised by Edward Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, then king of the British Empire, while he was in drag at a theatre in Paris.

On 16 December 1916 he was a leader of the group that murdered Rasputin. After the Revolution, Felix, his wife and daughter seized some family treasures and the British Navy helped them escape via Yalta. They settled in Paris.

They sued MGM in connection with the 1932 film, Rasputin and the Empress, in that the character who killed Rasputin could be based on only himself, and that it was libel to suggest that his wife had been raped by Rasputin. They were awarded £25,000, an enormous sum. This resulted in the disclaimer afterwards placed at the end of all Hollywood films: “The preceding was a work of fiction …”.





Yusupov wrote an autobiography: Avant l’exil, 1887-1919. Paris: Plon 310 pp 1952. Translated By Ann Green and Nicolas Katkoff as Lost Splendour. London: Cape 288 pp1954. Reissued Circlet Press 307 pp 2004. Translation online here.

Rudy Giuliani (1944 - ) lawyer, mayor, presidential candidate

Rudy was born in Brooklyn, New York, the grandchild of Italian immigrants with both police officers and criminals in his family.

As a lawyer, he made his name prosecuting high profile cases against organized crime.

He was Mayor of New York 1994-2001. He was awarded a KBE in 2002 for his part in the 9/11/01 attack on New York City.


Sir Rudolph was a candidate to be Republican Presidential Candidate 2007-8.


Unusually for a top politician, he is willing to appear in costume, including drag, on stage. In 1997, he wore a sequined dress and a wig from Rupaul’s wig-maker to play opposite Julie Andrews in her Victor-Victoria persona. Later the same year he played Rita Delvecchio’s mother in a sketch on Saturday Night Live. In 2000 he played a skit with Donald Trump where he is a matron buying perfume.

• Sara Kugler. “Rudy Giuliani in a dress: Will voters care? Republican presidential candidate, former NYC mayor could face backlash” MSNBC, April 14, 2007. www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18108978.
• John Dickerson. “Rudy in Leather and Lace: The theatrical journey of America's mayor”. Slate. May 8, 2007.www.slate.com/id/2165788/nav/tap1.
• “Rudy Giuliani”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Giuliani.
• “Mayorality of Rudy Giuliani”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayoralty_of_Rudy_Giuliani#Drag_appearances