Whatever happened to Pussy Katt (1929 - ).

Steve Clayton was born in Dayton, Ohio.

He moved to San Francisco, took the name Pussy Katt, lied about his age and started work as a female impersonator at Finocchio’s.

There was a rumor that Errol Flynn, David Niven and two others had taken Pussy Katt and friends back to a hotel suite at the Fairmont for a night of ‘debauchery’. Gossip columnist Louella Parsons heard this, but couldn’t use it.

Howard Hughes, who had first met Katt when he escorted Ava Gardner to Finocchio’s, returned for another meeting, and then he invited her to his suite at the Fairmont. Hughes had read a book that claimed that ancient Egyptian eunuchs were regarded as better sex objects after castration. In 1945, Hughes flew with Katt to Mexico City where she was castrated and was paid $50,000.

Afterwards he installed her in a villa in the new resort of Acapulco, and repeatedly visited her for almost two years. When he grew bored with her, he gave her enough money to open a local drag club, which flourished for three years before the police closed it down with charges of drugs and prostitution.

Katt was later reported as performing at Madame Arthur’s in Paris.

• Darwin Porter. Howard Hughes, Hell’s Angel: America’s Notorious Bisexual Billionaire, The Secret Life of the U.S. Emperor. Blood Moon Productions 2005: 575-7,593-4.

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There is no mention of Steve Clayton/Pussy Katt in Joanne Meyerowitz' How Sex Changed. However she is obviously one of the very early sex changes, 7 years before Christine Jorgensen. Her operation is simply described as a castration, and therefore did not include vaginoplasty. So that is practically the same as Jorgensen had from Dr Hamburger in Copenhagen, except for hormones. One wonders if Katt later did have vaginoplasty and take hormones as they became available in the next decade.

So Katt was 16 when she had her operation. The Gender Clinics that sprang up in later decades would have rejected her on this ground alone.

Katt has certainly kept her head down as regards media exposure. I cannot find anything about her except in Porter's book.

There was nothing about any drag queens or transsexuals in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, 2004, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes.

Dan Dailey (1915 – 1978) dancer, actor.

++ revised  24/01/11 to incorporate more sources, and to resort the facts chronologically.

Dailey was born and raised in New York City. He appeared in a minstrel show, and then in vaudeville before his first Broadway show in 1937. He was signed by MGM in 1940.

He served in the US Signal Corps during the Second World War and was discharged as a Captain.

In 1946 he was taking Linda Darnell's dresses from the Fox wardrobe department. Howard Hughes made him return them, but gave him a gift certificate for $5,000 at a leading department store.

He was teamed with Betty Grable in Mother Wore Tights, 1947.  He was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in When My Baby Smiles at Me, 1948 – also with Grable. It is said that she also lent him some of her screen wardrobe - the best couture that Hollywood had to offer.  Dan became one of the top male leads at Twentieth Century Fox in the early 1950s.

Andre Previn, the composer, tells in his biography how Dailey turned up drunk and in female clothing for the press screening of It's Always Fair Weather in 1954.  Dailey co-starred with Johnnie Ray in There's No Business Like Show Business the same year, and was close to him afterwards. There were rumors that they were more than friends.

He married his fourth wife, Gwen Carter, in February 1955. In June Inside magazine wrote that "After every binge he shows up around the film colony, decked from head to toe in outlandish female attire". In September that year Uncensored ran an article dispelling the rumors that he was a transvestite (which was a way of repeating the stories without being sued).

In January 1957 Confidential ran "The Night Dan Dailey was Dolly Dawn" claiming that he had danced in a pink tulle dress in a New York gay bar the previous March. Betty tried to save Dailey's career by pointing to his wife and family, but his film career was essentially over by that point, although he continued in television into the 1970s.

In 1976, actress cum gossip columnist Joyce Haber was on television promoting her novel about Hollywood, The Users. Asked to dish some gossip, she mentioned that one of the top dancer-actors was a closet transvestite with a costly and beautiful wardrobe that many women would envy.

After the suicide of his only son (from his third marriage), he was an embittered alcoholic. He died three years later, just after he had played boyfriend Clyde Tolson in The Private Files of J.Edgar Hoover, 1977. He appeared in over 60 films.

• "The Night Dan Dailey was Dolly Dawn". Confidential. Jan 1957.
• Spero Pastos. Pin-Up: The Tragedy of Betty Grable.  Putnam, 1986: 76-7.
• Andre Previn. No Minor Chords: my days in Hollywood. Doubleday 1991. Toronto & London: Bantam 1993:64
• Boze Hadleigh. The Vinyl Closet: Gays in the Music World. Los Hombres Press, 1991:229-30. Republished as Sing out! : gays and lesbians in the music world. Barricade Books 1997,  Robson Books 1999.
• William J. Mann. Behind the Screen: How gays and lesbians shaped Hollywood. Viking, 2001: 314-5.
• Darwin Porter. Howard Hughes, Hell’s Angel: America’s Notorious Bisexual Billionaire, The Secret Life of the U.S. Emperor.  Blood Moon Productions 2005: 630.

EN.Wikipedia

Lazlo Pearlman (1972 - ) actor.

Ilya Pearlman has been acting since she was 10-years-old.

She played male characters all over the US, from Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls with the Provincetown Players to all the male roles in Medea, Macbeth and A Comedy of Errors with Dan Savage-led theatre company Greek Active in Seattle. She also played the matron in Women Behind Bars. In New York Pearlman was a member of WOW Theater, playing the memorable role of Sandy Sonnenshein, the dyke Card Sharp in Lynn Hayes' Guitar Boy.

She was one of the Jew Girls in the jazz- performance-art-comedy group Sister Theresa and the All Jew Girl Band. As a lead singer and bass player she fronted such bands as the reggae/ska Small Axe, wave/punk bands Skinny Wires and Jezebel's Kiss.

In 1994 she created and directed an all-girl Romeo and Juliet, set in the modern day Seattle snakepit of rival women's softball teams.

She adapted and directed an oddly gendered and award-winning version of the Douglas Sirk/Ross Hunter/Lana Turner movie Madame X; and a surrealist The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Lawrence Welk; and a series of fantasy/nightmare performances for the fetish balls of Seattle.

At age 30 he transitioned to male, and directed the female-to-male comedy short, Unhung Heroes, 2002. He is currently located in London.

• Andrea Zanin. “Other tongues”. Montreal Mirror 28 Feb 2008 http://www.montrealmirror.com/2008/022808/arts2.html.
• www.gendelicious.com.

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As most of you know, a film biography of James Barry the 19th century trans man doctor is currently being made. Why have they cast a cisgendered woman in the part when a trans man with as much acting experience as Lazlo is available? I suspect very much that the film will deny that Barry was a trans man, and will pretend that he was a woman in disguise.

Méi Lánfāng (1894 - 1961) opera star.

Méi Lán (male name) was born into a family of Beijing Opera performers. He made his debut at age 10 at the Guanghe Theatre.


He acted for 50 years and almost exclusively played the qingyi role, a type of the dan role, that is he played female parts. He is generally known as Méi Lánfāng (a female name). His style became renowned as the ‘Mei school’.

He was the first Beijing opera star to tour abroad and took his art to Japan and the United States. He was welcomed to Hollywood by Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford. In the Soviet Union he was filmed by Sergei Eisenstein.

With the Japanese invasion in 1937, Méi moved to Hong Kong. He later returned to Shanghai, but grew a beard and moustache and refused to perform until 1946. In 1948 he appeared in Sheng si hen, China's first colour film.

After the Communist takeover he was director of China Beijing Opera Theatre and the Chinese Opera Research Institute, and was elected a deputy to the National People’s Congress.

He died of a heart attack.

Méi is the subject of a star-studded new biographical film by Mei-Juin Chen.

• George Kin Leung, Rushan Qi, and Jiuyao Huang. Mei Lan-Fang, Foremost Actor of China. Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1929.
• Mei Lanfang. Wutai shenghuo sishi nian (Forty Years of Life on the Stage). Beijing: Zhongguo Xiju Chubanshe, 1961.
• Mei-Juin Chen (dir). The Worlds of Mei Lanfang. Taiwan/China/US 57 mins 2000.
• Chen Kaige (dir & scr). Mei Lanfang, with Leon Lai as Mei Lanfang. China 2008.
• www.meilanfang.com.cn/mlf/english.htm.
• “Mei Lanfang”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mei_Lanfang.

Ella Wesner (1841 - 1917) male impersonator.

Ella Wesner started in showbiz as a ballet girl. She was Annie Hindle's dresser for a while which enabled her to learn the tricks of male impersonation.

She was very popular in the 1880s. Like Hindle she recycled British Music Hall material for American audiences. Her best remembered act was as a tipsy dude getting a shave. Some found her act rather coarse or dubious, but this contributed to its masculinity.

She never married and seems to have preferred female lovers. Her only reported romance was with Josie Mansfield, the notorious mistress of crooked financier Jim Fisk. After Fisk was shot by another of Josie's lovers, Edward Stokes, Ella and Josie went to Paris and presided over a salon at the Café Américan.

Ella asked to be buried in her male costume.

• Laurence Senelick. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre. Gender in performance. London, New York: Routledge, xvi, 540pp. 2000: 331.

Carol S. Riddell (? - ) sociologist.

Sociologist David Riddell, married and with a daughter, was a lecturer at the University of Lancaster, when he co-authored Approaching Sociology: A Critical Introduction, 1970, a work inspired by humanist Marxism, symbolic interactionism, phenomenological sociology and ethno-methodology. This work inspired the then undergraduate Richard Ekins who later wrote on the sociology of trans persons.

David completed transition to Carol with surgery from Dr Georges Burou in Casablanca in 1972. She was in the clinic there the same time as Jan Morris. The revised edition of Approaching Sociology in 1972 names the co-author as Carol S. Riddell.

Also in 1972, she presented a paper to the National Deviancy Conference 10 on “Transvestism and the Tyranny of Gender” in which she analyses the two-gender system as a feature of capitalism – which was an early influence on sociologist Dave King who also later wrote on the sociology of trans persons.

In 1980 Carol wrote a critical pamphlet reviewing Janice Raymond’s 'The Transsexual Empire' criticizing its factual errors, its betrayal of feminist ideals and its use of masculinist ideas. This was well received and much reprinted.

In 1985 she became a devotee of Sai Baba and the Findhorn Foundation, and her later work is devoted to the sect and to the Hebrides where it is located.

• Carol Riddell. “Divided Sisterhood : A Critical Review of Janice Raymond's 'The Transsexual Empire' “. Liverpool: News from Nowhere 1980. Parts 2,3,5 reprinted in Richard Ekins & Dave King (eds). Blending genders: social aspects of cross-dressing and sex-changing. London and New York: Routledge. 257 pp. 2002; reprinted in Stephen Whittle & Susan Stryker (eds). The Transgender Studies Reader. Routledge. 752 pp. 2006.
• Richard Ekins & Dave King. The Transgender Phenomenon. London: Thousand Oaks; California: Sage. 2006: 2, 5. Excerpt online at http://www.sagepub.com/upm-data/11790_Chapter01.pdf.
• www.carolriddell.co.uk. No longer available.

Books

• Carol Riddell. Social Self-Government: Theory and Practice in Yugoslavia. Our Generation, 1970.
• Margaret A Coulson & Carol Riddell. Approaching Sociology. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972. 
• Carol Riddell. The Findhorn Community: Creating a Human Identity for the 21st Century.  Findhorn Press, 1990.
• Carol Riddell. The Path to Love Is the Practice of Love: An Introduction to Spirituality with Self-Help Exercises for Small Groups. Findhorn Press, 1995.
• Carol Riddell. Tireragan: A Township on the Ross of Mull : a Study in Local History. Highland Renewal, 1996.
• Carol Riddell. Introducing ESOL Skills for Life Provision in a Further Education College: The Quest for Materials. University of Manchester, 2005.
• Carol Riddell.  A Way Forward for Humanity: The Spiritual Basis of the Findhorn Community. 2013.

Alfred Finnie (? – 1943) hustler, ball organizer.

There had been interracial drag balls in Chicago since the late nineteenth century.

In 1935, following the raid on the double wedding at the Cabin Inn, Alfred Finnie organized a small extra ball on the South Side at 25¢ to get in, mainly attended by blacks.

Each year it grew, and by the 1950s Finnie’s Balls attracted thousands both gay and straight, black and white, and was featured in Jet and Ebony magazines.

Apart from the balls, Alfred worked as a club doorman and street hustler. He was killed in a gambling brawl in 1943, but the balls continued in his name.

• “Gays and Lesbians”. Encyclopedia of Chicago. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/509.html. 
• Baim, Tracy. Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City's Gay Community. Chicago: Surrey Books, 2008: 29. 
• St. Sukie De la Croix. Chicago Whispers A History of LGBT Chicago Before Stonewall. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012: 146, 152-3.