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, ix, 349pp, 10 illustrations. 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.
• 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.

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

Herman 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.
• Joseph Bristow. Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture: The Making of a Legend. Ohio University Press. 448 pp 2009: 138-140.

EN.WIKIPEDIA   

Christine Chappel (1972 - 2000) electrical goods retailer.

Bryan Hooley was born in Perth, Western Australia. After moving to the UK he studied electronic engineering at Salford University.

He married Alison Halfacree in 1990 and moved to Roxwell, Essex to be with his wife. They had a daughter in 1992.

Hooley transitioned to female in 1994 and became Christine Chappel (after the nurse in Star Trek), but did not legally change her name.

In 1996 she claimed in court that she had had a two-year relationship with Rev Christopher Awdry whom she met at a model railway show in Chelmsford. Awdry is the son of Rev Wilbert Awdry who created the Thomas the Tank Engine series of books. She claimed that she had written some of the new books. The court found in favour of Rev Audry.

She sometimes appeared as Christine, and sometimes as Bryan. She was working at an electrical store in Chelmsford. In 2000 Christine won possession of the family home in court, which also ordered Alison to leave.

Shortly afterwards Christine disappeared. Her naked body washed up on a Suffolk beach weighted down by gym weights. She was identified by her fingerprints.

After an investigation, her brother-in-law, Charles Halfacree pleaded guilty to manslaughter, preventing the lawful burial of a body and conspiring to pervert the course of justice. They had had a fight. Halfacree is seven stones (44 kg) heavier than Chappel, and is 6’4” (1.93 m). During the fight her head hit a door frame. Halfacree hid the body for a month, and then he put it on a lilo and floated it out to sea. He was jailed for four years and three months.

Alison jumped bail, spent some time in Scotland, and then went to Poole, Dorset where she was arrested. She was sentenced to 18 months for perverting the course of justice and one month for absconding.

• Maurice Mcleod. “Chained body on beach was sex-change father”. The Guardian. Mar 6, 2000. On line at: www.pfc.org.uk/node/775.
• “Wife jailed for sheilding ex-partner’s killer”. BBC News. 10 Apr 2001. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1270859.stm.

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It is not explained how the police had her fingerprints to match against.