Pete Burns (1959–2016) performer

Burns was born in Cheshire to a father from Liverpool and a German Jewish mother who had fled from the Nazis.

He later told journalist Kris Kirk:

"When I was 13 I heard about April Ashley's sex change and I thought 'Bloody hell, that's what I have to do', 'cos I was really enjoying putting on make- up and stuff. But after a while I realised you didn't have to be a 'she' to do it".

At 14 he dropped out of Catholic school after it was clarified that his appearance/actions were not in line with the rules. Shortly afterwards Pete met hairdresser Lynne whom he married in 1980.

"The only thing that spoiled it was that the man in the registry office had to go and make a feeble joke by asking which one of us was the bride".

They remained married until 2006.

After working in a Liverpool record shop, Burns was able to perform with a band, and after personnel changes they became Dead or Alive, who had a number one single with a cover of "You Spin Me Round" in 1985. Pete fronted the group and was known for his androgynous look.

After his friend InternationalChrysis died in 1990, he put out a cover version of David Bowie's "Rebel Rebel" under her name in 1994:

"You've got your mother in a whirl /She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl ".

Burns became a media personality, swearing on the BBC, a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother. He became famous for his feminizing plastic surgeries, and appeared on television programs on the subject.

In 2006 Pete and Lynne were divorced; shortly afterwards he entered a civil union with Michael Simpson.

He published an autobiography in 2007. In 2010, Burns won £450,000 in damages from cosmetic surgeon Dr Maurizio Viel, who, the singer claims, left him 'suicidal' after his lip implant operations went wrong.

However by 2015, and more plastic surgery, he was bankrupt.

Pete died of cardiac arrest, aged 57.   

• Kris Kirk & Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press, 1984: 114-5.
  
• Sharon Walker & Rebecca Woodward (dir). Pete Burns's Cosmetic Surgery Nightmares. With Pete Burns and Michael Simpson. UK ITV 46 mins 2 Nov 2006.
  
• Pete Burns and Ian Cranna. Freak Unique: My Autobiography. London: John Blake. 2007.
  
• Mike Goudreau & Paul Tinelle (scr). VH1 News Presents: Plastic Surgery Obsession. With Pate Burns. UK VH1 2010.
  
• Jill Cumberbach (dir). 50 Greatest Plastic Surgery Shockers. With Pete Burns. UK Channel 4 120 mins 2 Dec 2010.
  
• Jody Thompson. "'My face might fall off': Pete Burns reveals he'll keep having plastic surgery despite a string of botched operations". The Daily Mail, 4 February 2011. www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1325929/Pete-Burns-My-face-fall-Ill-having-plastic-surgery.html.
  
• "The changing face of Pete Burns". Now Magazine, January 25, 2012. www.nowmagazine.co.uk/celebrity-pictures/gallery-specials/the-changing-face-of-pete-burns-234897.
  
• Jill Cumberbach (dir). The Body Shocking Show. With Pate Burns. UK E4 30 mins 2013.
  
• Fay Strong. "Pete Burns declared bankrupt after spending hundreds of thousands on surgery". The Mirror, 21 April 2015. www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/pete-burns-declared-bankrupt-after-5556983. 
• Hannah Ellis-Petersen,  "Pete Burns, frontman of Dead Or Alive, dies aged 57".  The Guardian, 24 October 2016.   www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/oct/24/dead-or-alive-frontman-pete-burns-dies-aged-57.
  

EN.WIKIPEDIA(Pete Burns)   IMDB   EN.WIKIPEDIA(Dead or Alive)    Transgender-Net





   

A review of Kris Kirk & Ed Heath - Men in Frocks, 1984

There are three books on trans people in the UK in the 1980s: this book, Richard Ekins' Male Femaling and Liz Hodgkinson's Body Shock.  I have all three side by side on my shelf.  Each book focuses on a different group:  Hodgkinson on SHAFT, Ekins on the Beaumont Society and Kirk and Heath on the TV/TS group.  Somehow this results in no one person appearing in more than one book, although in reality there was migration among the three groups - for example we have seen that Janette Scott moved from the executive of the TV/TS group to the executive of the Beaumont Society.

Christopher Pious Mary Kirk (1950 – 1993) was a journalist for Gay News in the early 1980s. Later he was an openly gay music journalist writing for Melody Maker, The Guardian and other publications. In 1984 he published Men In Frocks, with photographs by his lover Ed Heath. In 1986, Channel 4 television broadcast a documentary-drama about Kris Kirk entitled A Boy Called Mary. In 1988 Kris and Ed moved to rural Wales to open a bookshop, but three years later Kris found that he had Aids. He went blind in 1992, and died in 1993. Other works: A Boy Called Mary: Kris Kirk's Greatest Hits, 1990 - a collection of his music journalism.

• Kris Kirk with photographs by Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press 1984.

Note: this book was written in the early 1980s and thus, inevitably, it does not conform to the expectations of the 2010s.   The title was perhaps ill-chosen even then.   Kris, several times in the book has to apologize that a person (Poppy Cooper, Roz Kaveney, Letitia Winter) is not a man in a frock, they having become a woman.  However the book is of major historical interest, and many of its observations are still valid.



Introduction

Kris asks where you would have looked if you wanted to wear drag in the 1940s?

"Well, if you were lucky enough to be on one of the few gay grapevines - and the right gay grapevine at that - you might hear of a secret party in somebody's private home where you could slip on a frock on arrival and slip it off again when you left.  There was little else. ... So what happened between then and now? What triggered off the rise of drag in Britain?"  

His answer is that

"The evolution of modern drag goes hand in glove with the increased visibility of those gay men who not only enjoy debunking the traditional male image, but also enjoy doing it in public."

Vivian Namaste has claimed that the pioneering for trans people was mainly done by sex workers, but has declined to provide a supporting narrative for her claim.  Kris' claim for the pioneering by gays is found in this book.

The Chorus Queens

Following the Second World War a venue of sorts did open up for the isolated few who wanted something other than the stereotyped male role.  In California Louise Lawrence was introducing trans women to each other, as was Marie André Schwidenhammer in Paris.  However in Britain the only option was the soldiers-in skirts revues, and of course to get into those you had to have some inclination, if not actual talent, towards singing and dancing, although you did not have to have actually served in the forces. The first such show was actually a US import, Irving Berlins' This is the Army, which played the London Palladium for four nights in 1944.  The going wage in the British versions was £6 or £7 a week and half of that went on draughty digs where they sometimes had to share four-to-a-bed.  We have already noted Poppy Cooper whose path to womanhood was via these revues. Other performers included Terry Gardener and Canadian Loren Lorenz.  Shelley Summers did drag while with HM forces in Burma until 1947 (for which he got sergeant's stripes) but did not join any soldiers-in-skirts revue because of family, but did become a drag performer in the 1960s.  While most books on either theatre or on cross-dressing barely pay any attention to these shows, Kris points out that while Lena Horne could not fill the Theatre Royal in Leeds, Men in Frocks played to capacity houses; Sophie Tucker's box-office record at the Golders Green Empire held for years until it was broken by Forces Showboat.  There was a significant difference from the drag acts of the 1930s such as Bartlett & Ross or Ford & Sheen and the pantomime dames all of whom had been doing cod drag, that is being funny.  Terry Gardener, who was in the first We Were in the Forces in 1944, explained:

"The general idea of the first show was to put men into dresses to make them look dreadful, but that soon started to change because the audience liked the prettiest ones best" - which much suited the performers. 

Most were gay:

 "Heterosexuals? In the choruses?  I can't say I ever met any.  I guess it was possible" - Loren Lorenz. 

 Men who were not queens were 'hommes' ('omnies' in Polari).  A surprising number of omnies wanted to bed the queens, but

"If you ever suggested to an homme in those days that he was homosexual, even bisexual, he would have killed you" - Poppy Cooper.

Did somebody say: what about Gillies, Dillon, Cowell?  They don't fall within the pervue of this book.  Not only were none of them gay, and to be a trans patient of Gillies you had to be the child of either one of England's top doctors or of a Baron.  Anyway he stopped after two patients.  Hoi polloi need not apply.  

Gay Paree and the Sea Queens

By the mid-1950s the forces drag shows had run their course, and the audiences were no longer coming - many of them had acquired televisions.  There were other things happening that were a bit of a surprise to the queens: those who took being female more seriously.  There were stories in the press: Christine Jorgensen, Bobbie Kimber, Roberta Cowell.  

Basically the show queens had nowhere to turn to.  The few exceptions were Terry Gardener who partnered with Barri Chat and found work in regular variety shows, as did Phil Starr and Terry Dennis.  Danny Carrol changed his name to La Rue and in 1955 started a residency at Winston's Club in Mayfair that lasted for six years.  Mrs Shufflewick pursued an idiosyncratic career on the wireless and also did eight seasons at the Windmill Theatre - many of her audience took her to be a woman. However Roy Alvis, not finding any drag work, became a meat porter at Smithfield Market until the pub drag boom in the late 1960s.  Some like Poppy Cooper went to Paris where Le Carrousel and Chez Madam Arthur were hiring.  Tommy Osborne remembers: 

"I liked Paris, but I wasn't too happy in the show.  I was a singer and I used to go out there and belt out the numbers big and loud and forget about being in drag, but most of the audience was there purely for the sensation of seeing boys with tits.  The boys were all incredibly beautiful.   But they just couldn't do anything, bless them."   

1953-4 was a particularly good time to not be in England.  In addition to the Coronation, David Maxwell-Fyfe, Home secretary 1951-4, and John Nott-Bower, Commission of Scotland Yard(1953-8), under US pressure and in the shadow of the Guy Burgess defection to Moscow, started a purge of homosexuals.  In 1953, the actor John Gielgud, the writer Rupert Croft-Cooke and the MP William Field were all convicted.  In 1954 Edward Montagu, Lord of Beaulieu, the writer Peter Wildeblood and Michael Pitt-Rivers were convicted and imprisoned.  On release Rupert Croft-Cooke moved to Morocco, and drag entertainer Ron Storme worked in Tunisia.  

The other destination for show queens was the merchant navy.  Lorri Lee recalls:

"The sea was an ideal life for queens in those days.  There were hundreds of us, literally.  Competition was very stiff if you wanted an homme.  ... The Sea Queens were all drag queens and had a frock tucked away, just in case.  We did shows on a little stage on the ship: the crews got the dirty version, while the passengers got the cleaned up version."  

On layovers in London, a popular place to stay was Stella Minge's.  Other sea queens were Loren Lenz and Yvonne Sinclair.

However there were drag gatherings in Britain that were not bothered by the police, such as Blackpool at Easter, and the Vic-Wells Costume Balls (Old Vic and Sadler's Wells) although it had signs posted saying "No Drag Allowed", and later the Chelsea Arts Ball, which had a similar sign.

The Pub Queens

There was very little pub drag before 1960 except for a few tolerant, mainly straight, pubs in the East End, such as the Bridge House (which later became a heavy metal/punk/goth pub) in Canning Town.  Through the 1960s the number of pubs doing drag increased.  Roy Alvis returned to doing drag, although he was arrested by the police for doing so more than once.   Gay men started going to drag shows in straight pubs in that that was a good way to meet gay men.

The drag scene was helped by the various youth homeovestic fashions - the Teddy Boys, The Mods, the Rockers - which opened up clothing options so that short-back-and-sides, jacket and tie were no longer so overwhelmingly demanded.  The iconography was upended in the mid 1960s, following the Beatles and the Stones when long hair on men became acceptable.  Swinging London came and went, as did the Permissive Society.   Drag was never central to either but it benefited from the further loosenings of required dress.  The first edition of Roger Baker's  book Drag: a history of female impersonation on the stage came out in 1968.

In London, the Union Tavern, the Vauxhall Tavern and Black Cap became established as drag venues.  A similar situation happened in Manchester, where the Union Tavern was the place.   Danny La Rue opened his own club in 1964, performed for royalty and for a while was Britain's highest paid performer.  Gays who were not queens were arguing in public for changes in the law, and the law really was changed in 1967 as part of a liberal package from the Labour Party which included abortion and divorce law reform.  While a significant number of the drag performers did continue their journey and become women, the majority did not.

On p48 Kris notes that

"Whatever their reason for donning drag in the first place, dragging up soon became 'just a job' for most of the regular Pub Queens.  One of the many ironies of professional drag is that, for many performers, what began as a giggle or as a pleasure soon became a chore.  And then drag queens come to realise what women have always known: that the fun of dressing up quickly evaporates when you feel obliged to do it." 

Another change in the 1960s was the innovation of miming to records.  The act Alvis and O'Dell are credited with being the first when they mimed to Susan Maughan singing Bobby's Girl, a 1962 single that went to number 3 in the UK and number six in Norway.  Alvis and O'Dell were then one of the hottest acts in town -- until every body else got a tape recorder.

Kris. a gay man who loves drag, but was unhappy about what the pub scene had become,  finishes the pub chapter with a regretful survey:

"I have spoken to drag performers who have been genuinely hurt at the suggestion that they are satirising women because they feel  - however mistakenly - that they are paying homage to their female idols; and while there are Diana Rosses and Shirley Basses in this world I cannot see how they will ever be dissuaded of this.  ... There are also drag acts like Dave Dale who consider themselves to be character actors who do caricatures of both men and women.  There are acts who are still doing the pregnant bride routine which they were doing twenty years ago.  And there are acts which prey on the basest instincts of their audience, perpetuating the notion that women smell like fish and that black men swing from trees.  What the latter acts do is unforgivable and I prefer to reserve my venom for them and those unthinking audiences of gay men who appear to share their brute misogyny and racism."

The Ball Queens

The problem with the Chelsea Arts Ball was that officially drag was not permitted, and if you did not pass well, or drew attention, there was a risk of being ejected.  By the mid-1960s there were balls that were really drag balls.  After trying different locations the Porchester Hall was selected as the place.  Prominent among the organizers were Jean Fredericks and Ron Storme.  At first most of those who went thought of themselves as drag queens,   A fair number of them didn't bother at first with female underwear, and in fact would rush home afterwards to change and then go out to pick up a bloke. But then they realized that there are lots of men who went to went to the balls to pick them up, and that these men expected them to be wearing stockings and frilly knickers. (1)

As the balls continued, those better described as transvestites or transsexuals starting coming.

"The drag queens thought the TVs were peculiar for wanting to dress like an ordinary woman does, and the TVs thought it peculiar that the queens like to go over the top.   In those days you could always tell them apart by the clothes.  -- Ron Storme

TV and TS (2)


In this chapter Kris discusses the differences between DQ, TV and TS.  The stereotypes, and that many do not fit the stereotypes.  He concludes:

"If there is any one lesson to be learned from studying this field it is that the individual is individual.  People define themselves and the self-definition must always takes priority over the received wisdom.   I have met self-defined draq queens whom others would describe as TV either because they enjoy 'passing'; or because they 'dress' so often that it could be seen as a compulsion; or because they wear lingerie, either to turn men on or to make themselves feel sensuous.  I have met drag performers who have grown to dislike drag, and men who insist on being called 'cross-dressers' because they dislike what the word 'drag' stands for, and men who wear part-drag in order to create confusion and doubt amongst others, but who would never wear full drag because that would defeat their object.  I know self-defined TVs who are gay or bisexual or oscillating, some of them having learned to cross this sexuality barrier through their cross-dressing.  I have met TVs  who dress like drag queens and drag queens who dress like TVs, and TVs whose cross-dressing has encouraged them to question their 'male role', which in turn has made them examine their idea of 'femininity'.  And perhaps most important of all, I have learned how marshy a terrain is the middle ground between our earlier clear-cut distinction between transvestites and transexuals."

Theatrics

Until 1968 theatres had to obtain a license for each production from the Lord Chamberlain.  This was of course inimical to innovation.  John Osborne's A Patriot For Me at the Royal Court Theatre in 1965 was banned because of the drag ball scene – it became a private theatre club to continue the performance.  The previous year, Douglas Druce, whose imitation of Elizabeth Windsor was regarded as stunning, was invited to close the first half at a show called Sh... at the New Century Theatre in Notting Hill Gate.  This was met by great applause, in that Druce had got HRH absolutely right.  The next night the Lord Chamberlain in person appeared and would close the theatre if the scene were not cut.  (3)

The Lord Chamberlain also did not approve of any drag shows.  Chris Shaw managed to get some staged by disguising them as Old Tyme Music Hall.

The 1970s, however, were very different. Tim Curry got the role of his life in The Rocky Horror Show which opened in 1972.  Lindsay Kemp opened Flowers, based on Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers at the Edinburgh Festival in 1974.  The Cocteau inspired Grande Eugene appeared at the Roundhouse.

The US histories tell us how San Francisco's Cockettes were such a flop in New York.   The same thing happened to the Ballet Trocadero and the Cycle Sluts from the US and the Australian Simon and Monique's Playgirls Revue when they came to London.  However Hot Peaches were successful and an inspiration to the Brixton Faeries and Bloolips.   Divine played the warden in Women Behind Bars, 1976. Hinge and Bracket started their career.


The Rad Drag Queens

London Gay Liberation Front was established in 1970.   At first there was no drag.

"It started with jellabas and kaftans and long hair and flowers ... then we discovered glitter ... and the nail varnish.  Later some of us - a quarter of the men, I'd say, at some time or other - would get a nice new frock for the next Gay Lib dance.  Then a few people began wearing it to meetings.  It just evolved." -- Michael James.

It then became street theatre, notably the Miss Trial demo outside the Old Bailey in support of the women who were on trial for disrupting the Miss World contest, and then the disruption of the 1971 Christian Festival of Light. Some GLF queens wore drag because it felt right, some for fun and some for political reasons.   

Generally the queens were living in communal squats and in poverty in Brixton and in Notting Hill, and wore drag all day every day. They aligned themselves with lesbians against the masculine gay men who were dominating the GLF meetings. When the women finally split from GLF in February 1972, the Rad Fems began to dominate at the All-London meetings at All Saints Hall in Powis Square, which was a bit intimidating for newcomers.

However the RadFems also demonstrated against the launch of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, which allowed The Sunday Times to run an article on the irony of feminist men telling women how they should behave. The fledging Gay News used this to disassociate from what they referred to as 'fascists in frocks'. The initial issues of Gay News were hostile to GLF in general and even more so to the queens.

There was also a Transvestite, Transsexual and Drag Queen group which met separately.


And Now?

The 1970s and 1980s had a lot of drag on record and stage: David Bowie and Boy George.  The punks initially went to gay bars because they weren't accepted anywhere else, and some of the gay bars evolved into punk bars.   The New Romantics and the Blitz crowd came and went.

Kris provides a profile of many who were active in the 1980s.

Endpiece

"In general, people do not like complexity.  That is why when they come across something like transvesting they look to science to provide them with cut and dried answers.  But science, for all its valuable contributions to understanding, has little to tell us about the human spirit.  To learn about that you have to talk to and observe human beings.  If the people in this book are saying anything at all with one voice, it is that there is no overall psychological compulsion for cross-dressing. There is nothing that the men we have spoken to have in common except that they dress in the clothes associated with the opposite sex.  They are the most extraordinarily  wide range of people, they see all sorts of different reasons for why they dress, and they dress in all sorts of ways.  We are left, as we always knew that we would be, with more questions than answers.  This might appear confusing, but of course confusion is what drag is all about.  And confusion can be a very valuable tool, because when people are confused, they are sometimes obliged to think.  And perhaps the more they think about it, the more they will find an understanding of why men sometimes discover a wish or a need to play sometimes at being 'not-men'."

_________________________________________________________________________________

(1) Indifference to underwear can be argued either way 1) that it is a marker of a lack of a female gender identity; 2) that it is marker of a non-erotic gender identity. Either way it is not confined to self-identified drag queens -- see Felicity Chandelle.  Also some cis women insist on sexy underwear, while other choose what is practical.

(2) We have already seen Virginia Prince's unlikely claim to have coined the abbreviations TV and TS.   I think that their use here demonstrates  that they are the obvious abbreviations and were arrived at independently by different people.

(3) This of course is long before Helen Mirren essayed the part.

April Ashley, while androphilic, is not featured here because she did not go to any of the places discussed.

None of the people in this book appear in any book by Vern Bullough.  It was realizing that that led me to perceive the systematic exclusion of gay/androphilic trans persons from Bullough's work.

Probably Ray Blanchard would regard these persons as "homosexual transsexuals" as he uses the term, although many of them defy his stereotyping.  However he never does discuss work by other writers outside a small circle of psychologists.   The one person in the world who does self-identity as a "homosexual transsexual" in the Blanchardian sense, ie Kay Brown, is not such that she would would be featured in this book even if she were British.  In the autobiographical accounts that she has published there is no mention of participating in gay events, nor does she express similar sentiments to the ones found in this book.

Like - well actually very unlike - Darryl Hill's Trans Toronto, this book is an oral history.  Hill seems to think that all his interviewees must be confidential.  In some cases there is such a need, but some of Hill's interviewees are well known to trans readers.  He should have given them the option to be identified by their full name.  Also they are encouraged to talk using their own term rather than just to affirm or dissent from theory points.

Stella Minge (192?–?) sailor, bawdy house keeper

Stella Minge, who had been in the merchant navy, had a house in Silvertown, (map) Newham, London, in the 1950s and 1960s, that was known for its frequent Friday night parties that often lasted until Sunday or even Monday. Stella, a queen herself, often encouraged younger queens, and her place was generally known among sailors, straight as well as gay, as the place to go when in London.

Police officers often stopped by because of the noise complaints, but individually would come back when off duty to join in the fun. Sometimes it was raided.

One day when Stella was going to be away for a while she went to the local police station to ask them to keep a eye on her house. The constable replied: "Stella, we've been keeping an eye on your house for donkeys' years".

*Not the DJ in Rochdale, nor the alias of Sapphire Dior.

• Kris Kirk & Ed Heath. Men in Frocks. London: GMP, 1984: 32.
  
• Ian Lucas. Impertinent Decorum: Gay Theatrical Manoeuvres. London: Cassell, 1994: 54.
  
• Ann Edmead. Tumbleweed: The Boy. Strategic Book Publishing, 2011: Chp 6: Stella Minge, the Queen of Silver Town.
  

__________________________________________________________

Minge is slang for female pubic hair, but there are real people with the name (try googling it).  So it may have been Stella’s birth name, or it may just be a drag name.  We have earlier seen that Finocchio is a negative word for gay in Italian, but also the name of real people.

Stella’s home is referred to as a ‘bawdy house’ in Men in Frocks.  It could also be described as a Molly House – the last one in London?  And still active in the 1960s.

Poppy Cooper (192?–1988) bus conductor, performer

Cooper was working as a bus conductor in Preston, Lancashire in the late 1940s, where he was generally known as a pansy.

On a trip to Morecambe, he was able to catch Forces Showboat – The All-Male Revue at the Alhambra Theatre. "I thought that it was fabulous. The girls were so glamorous and the dresses looked gorgeous. In fact the costumes were a load of tat close to, but the lights were so wonderful in those days." He went backstage to see if there was a chance of a job.

"In those days I had quite a lot of blonde hair with a big quiff, and I reminded them of a queen who had just left because Loren shouted, 'Darling, we've got another Lucretia here – come and varder this one' ". 

Poppy was told to come back tomorrow with a wig and drag, and went down the market to make the needed purchases.

Men in Frocks p17

The going wage was £6 or £7 a week and half of that went on draughty digs where they sometimes had to share four-to-a-bed. However such shows were the only place at that time that a male-bodied person could dress female.

By the mid-1950s, the all-male revues had run their course and no longer attracted audiences.  Poppy popped over to Paris and was employed at Le Carrousel.

"There was more freedom there and you could go out onto the streets in drag if you wanted to, or go out with men to a restaurant after the show. …. French, Belgiums, Germans – they loved the travesti. The English seem different."

Poppy completed her transition to being a woman in the 1970s, and later did a striptease act using the name Tuxedo.

++When she retired from the stage, she set up home in south-west London with a lover who stayed with her till the end.   She passed away in her sleep.

• Kris Kirk & Ed Heath. Men in Frocks. London: GMP, 1984: 13, 15-7, 19-20, 24, 27,29-31.
• "Obituary - Poppy Cooper".  Glad Rag, 40, 1988.
  
• Paul Baker & Jo Stanley. Hello Sailor!: The Hidden History of Gay Life at Sea. London: Longman, 2003: 37,85.
  

Yvonne Sinclair (1934 – 2013) sailor, changeback, activist, actor.

Sinclair was born in the Old Kent Road, London, and was cross-dressing by the age of three. One of the sisters assisted in this. After experimenting with men, Sinclair married a girlfriend when she became pregnant, but the marriage did not last.

After a period in the Merchant Navy, Sinclair was increasingly Yvonne. She worked on stage, but often had to revert to her male persona to obtain work. She later described herself as a 'lapsed transsexual': she was once within 14 days of the operation, but then changed her mind.

The TV/TS Group (sometimes called Friend TV/TS Group) started in 1976 as an offshoot of London Friend, which in turn was an offshoot of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. London Friend sublet space at 274 Upper St. Soon Yvonne took over the running, supposedly for a month at first.

Men in Frocks, p76

By then the Gay Liberation Front Transvestite, Transsexual and Drag Queen Group and Bethnal Rouge were defunct. The almost forgotten UK branch of the Transsexual Action Organization (TAO) had broken away from its US parent and shortly afterwards had ceased to exist. The other group with a US parent, The Beaumont Society was then still under the influence of Virginia Prince and thus restrictive (no gays, no transsexuals, no trans men) and worked from a Post Office Box Number and required vetting. SHAFT (Self-Help Association For Transsexuals) was not founded until 1980.

Thus, apart from the Porchester Hall Drag Balls, held every three months, the TV/TS Group was the only venue where a trans person could just turn up for a small admission fee (at first £2.00), no questions asked, and the doors were open every weekend. The premises consisted of two small rooms and a single toilet on the first floor and a changing room on the top floor. Food and drink were provided, but more importantly advice, straight talking and the chance to meet other trans people. There was of course a telephone support line.

From 1982 onwards drag balls were run at the Tudor Lodge and continued until 1995. They were different from the Porchester Balls in that the East End location attracted fewer professional drag artistes and gays, and was less high spirited. Also in 1982 Yvonne organised two boat trips on the Thames to raise money for the group: "the guests including trannies, drag queens, gays, wives, partners and anyone who just wanted to be there really. It was great fun."

The same years a membership was formed with the idea of running a dress shop with meeting rooms attached. The group's magazine, The Glad Rag, was started, and the office was open five days a

week. The aim was to own or lease their own building. The group was now more so a collective effort, but it was Yvonne who was the most visible, and who appeared on radio programs and became the name given out by newspaper agony aunts.

Kris Kirk and Ed Heath who were developing what became their seminal book, Men In Frocks, 1984, came to the group to meet people, and Yvonne and several others are featured in it.

The 36 page booklet, Transvestism within a partnership of marriage and families, also 1984, was written by Yvonne with contributions from a couple of others. This was the first English book on the topic (another pamphlet was issued a few years later by the Wives of the Beaumont Society WOBS). Woodhouse compares Sinclair's booklet with Virginia Prince's 1967 book The Transvestite and His Wife, which she regards as "the wishful projections of some transvestites who want it all their own way". Sinclair recognises that a transvestite can harm "those whom they least wish to hurt". Three wives recount their experiences. Sinclair admonishes a transvestite not to abuse his wife's acceptance:

"Putting on a frock is not being a woman. Most of the time, for the average woman, the routine is pretty boring, and housework a drudge. It might be fun for you to tie a scarf around your wig and then start dusting the shelves and mop the floor; she will have to follow you round afterwards and do it properly. She scrubs the floor in an old dress; not like you, in a pretty print dress and high heels that are more suited to the local tea dance."

By 1985 London Friend knew that the lease at 274 Upper St was about to expire and that both groups must find new premises. The TV/TS Group was registered as a charity. After a couple of prospects falling through, Yvonne found the building at 2 French Place in Shoreditch, and signed a 12 year lease. Much work needed to be done. Fortunately one member, Christina, was a builder, and gave up a month's work to make the building liveable. A member who was a plumber fitted the central heating. Others pitched in to do the physical work, and the doors were opened 5 July 1986.

A Partners' Support Group was set up in 1986 at the initiative of a couple of wives, and even set up their own phone line. It ran into problems in that their husbands did not always respect privacy and even walked into the meeting. Some felt threatened by a group that excluded them. The wives reasonably concentrated on mutual support of each other rather than prioritising support for their husbands, but this became a contention with the larger group. At this time Annie Woodhouse was developing her book, Fantastic Women, 1989, and met with both the wives and the transvestites.

One special event was a discussion with psychiatrist Russell Reid, who helped so many transsexuals on their way. Yvonne continued to appear on radio and television programs and was interviewed by newspapers and magazines. In 1987 the group ran a TV/TS conference in Scarborough, and made a profit on the event.

However when she took a break later that year, an anti-Yvonne clique developed, and Yvonne decided in June 1988 that she had had enough, and left the group. The group was then co-ordinated by Vic Sherman and Janette Scott (later on the executive of the Beaumont Society). In 1990 the Co-ordinator's job went to Derek Shaw-Larkman, who had previously run Obstretric Practioners Ltd. The Group finally closed in February 1992. In 1988 the Group had £35,000 in bank deposits and an annual turnover of £50,000. When it closed it had zero assets.

Yvonne continued offering a change-away service, but after thefts and the building being trashed, she closed the operation in 1996. She suffered a mild stroke in 2004, but still made it to transvestite events.

She was one of the contributors to Surya Monro's Gender Politics.

Yvonne died aged 78.

*Not the 1930s actress, nor the gospel singer, nor the marriage counsellor.

• Yvonne Sinclair. Transvestism within a partnership of marriage and families. Transvestite /Transsexual Social Group. 36 pp. 1984. Online. 
• Kris Kirk and Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. Gay Men's Press. 159pp 1984: 74,76,80-1. 
• Annie Woodhouse. Fantastic Women: Sex, Gender, and Transvestism. Rutgers University Press, 1989: 49-51, 124, 130-1. 
• Virginia Ironside. "Dilemmas: Is he also Shirley from Purley?". The Independent, 03 March 1994. www.independent.co.uk/life-style/dilemmas-is-he-also-shirley-from-purley-1426694.html.
• Surya Monro. Gender Politics:  Citizenship, Activism, and Sexual Diversity. Pluto Press, 2005: 17, 111, 205. 
• www.yvonnesinclair.co.uk

____________________________________________________________

I attended the group in 1988, but was naively unaware of the politics going on.

Yvonne claims the 1987 conference as a first, but this is to ignore the Leeds 1974 conference and the Leicester 1975.

Apart from an unexplained 1-line reference in Male Femaling, there is no mention at all of Yvonne in the Richard Ekins books.  However what she did fits right in with what Ekins was writing about.  The lack should be explained.

Roz Kaveney (1949 - ) writer, critic, editor, activist.

Kaveney grew up in Acton, London. Before going to university, he spent some time with a group of trans sex workers in Manchester who helped with self-definition, and with self-defense. At Pembroke College, Oxford the gay scene was somewhat lacking:

“I wanted something that promised more, something wilder and saner. Something with radical politics and a sense of fun and experimental attitudes to the possibilities of sex and style and screaming in the street.”

A phone call to the newly formed Gay Liberation Front in London led to the TV/TS Group, which turned out to be run by Rachel Pollack then living but fifty yards from where Kaveney had grown up. Together they formed a transvestite presence at GLF meetings.

From the late 1970s Kaveney established a reputation as a Science Fiction critic, and also wrote on feminism, gay rights and censorship. Roz had completed transition by 1980.

"I was reared Catholic but got over it, was born male but got over it, stopped sleeping with boys about the time I stopped being one and am much happier than I was when I was younger."

In the 1980s Roz was a co-editor of Interzone science fiction magazine. From 1989 she was a founding member of Feminists Against Censorship. In the early 1990s she was in the Midnight Rose collective (with Alex Stewart, Neil Gaiman and Mary Gentle) that produced a series of SF anthologies for Penguin Books.

In the mid-90s, when she was Deputy Chair of Liberty, she wrote their report of transsexuals for submission to the UN. The Director, having come across the term ‘transgender’ and thinking it a more radical synonym, did a search and replace throughout the document. Roz persuaded him that the best solution was a policy switch in favour of appropriate rights for all trans people.

She was a contributing editor to The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 1997.

In her essay for More & Whittle’s Reclaiming Gender, 1999 Roz articulates six non-negotiable axioms as the basis for any workable transgender and transsexual politics:

1. Display solidarity with all of our transgender (including transsexual) brothers and sisters
2. Build alliances by getting involved as ourselves in other areas of politics
3. Don’t let journalistic and intellectual attacks on our community go unanswered; We can have and keep the intellectual and moral high ground
4. Be creative, be smart, be ourselves and don’t let anybody tell us who we are and what we do
5. Refuse the pathological medical model - we are not sick, just different
6. Refuse those politics - heterosexism, body fascism - that work against all the above, but most especially against no.1.

She continues:

“The reformist transsexual agenda often sets up, as part of its argument, a largely false dichotomy between ‘people who pass’ and the inferior capacity of ‘people who don’t pass’. ... And, of course, none of us really know that we have passed all the time and as long as we fetishize the model of passing as the only way to be accepted as who we are, for just that long our self-esteem will be under threat from any small child or gutter journalist who feels like having a go. ... The possibility, or even probability, that someone passes most of the time is no defence for them on the rare occasions when they do not. You are only as safe as your roughest day.”

Roz is a regular contributor to The Guardian, The Independent and The Times Literary Supplement, and was number 85 in the Independent on Sunday Pink List, 2011.

• Kris Kirk and Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press. 1984: 82.  
• Roz Kaveney. More Tales from the Forbidden Planet. London: Titan Books, 1987.
• Neil Gaiman, Mary Gentle, and Roz Kaveney. The Weerde. Bk. 1, A Shared World Anthology. ROC, 1992.
• Neil Gaiman, Mary Gentle, and Roz Kaveney. The Weerde. A Shared World Anthology Bk. 2. Harmondsworth, Mddx: Penguin, 1993.
• “Roz Kaveney”. John Clute and John Grant. The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997.
• Roz Kaveney. “Talking Transgender Politics”. In Kate More and Stephen Whittle. Reclaiming Genders: Transsexual Grammars at the Fin De Siècle. London: Cassell, 1999. http://bit.ly/rpFY0e.
• Roz Kaveney. Reading the Vampire Slayer: An Unofficial Critical Companion to Buffy and Angel. London: Tauris Park Paperbacks, 2001.
• Roz Kaveney. From Alien to The Matrix: Reading Science Fiction Film. London: I.B. Tauris, 2005.
• Kaveney, Roz. Teen Dreams: Reading Teen Film from Heathers to Veronica Mars. London: I.B. Tauris, 2006.
• Kaveney, Roz. Superheroes. London: I. B. Tauris, 2008.
• Jorjet Harper. “Pop Culture, Queer Culture: An Interview with Roz Kaveney”. Windy City Times, 2008-04-16. www.windycitymediagroup.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=18047.
• Roz Kaveney and Jennifer Story. Nip. London: I B Tauris & Co Ltd, 2011.
• Roz Kaveney. “Shot, Stabbed, Choked, Strangled, Broken: a ritual for November 20th”. In Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman. Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation. Berkeley, Calif: Seal Press, 2010.
• "Roz Kaveney". Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roz_Kaveney.
• "Roz Kaveney". The Guardian. www.guardian.co.uk/profile/roz-kaveney.
• Roz Kaveney. "Gay Liberation Front at 40". Pride London. www.pridelondon.org/component/content/article/61-glf/111-glfrozkaveney
• http://glamourousrags.dymphna.net.
• http://rozk.livejournal.com.
• “Roz Kaveney” Internet Speculative Fiction DB. www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?Roz_Kaveney.

____________________________________________________________

I also went to the GLF TV/TS group, but in 1974, by which time it was pretty naf.

The Radical Feminists and Bethnal Rouge

One of the threads in London Gay Liberation in the early 1970s was Radical Feminism (not to be confused with the Radical Feminism of the 1980s), and in fact it was not a self-chosen name:

"We didn't take the label radfems. It got thrown at us one night in an argument … 'You radical femme acid queens!' … it was something from outside. We never used words like that. We would say 'get a frock on dear' whenever they were ranting away.(Bette Bourne quoted in Power: 273)".

"It started with jellabas and kaftans and long hair and flowers ... then we discovered glitter … and then nail varnish. Later, some of of us – a quarter of the men, I'd say, at some time or other – would get a nice new frock for the next Gay Lib dance. Then a few people began wearing it to meetings. It just evolved (Michael James quoted in Kirk: 96)".

It then became street theatre, notably the Miss Trial demo outside the Old Bailey in support of the women who were on trial for disrupting the Miss World contest, and then the disruption of the 1971 Christian Festival of Light. Some GLF queens wore drag because it felt right, some for fun and some for political reasons.

Generally the queens were living in communal squats and in poverty in Brixton and in Notting Hill, and wore drag all day every day. They aligned themselves with lesbians against the masculine gay men who were dominating the GLF meetings. When the women finally split from GLF in February 1972, the Rad Fems began to dominate at the All-London meetings at All Saints Hall in Powis Square, which was a bit intimidating for newcomers.

However the RadFems also demonstrated against the launch of the feminist magazine Spare Rib, which allowed The Sunday Times to run an article on the irony of feminist men telling women how they should behave. The fledging Gay News used this to disassociate from what they referred to as 'fascists in frocks'. The initial issues of Gay News were hostile to GLF in general and even more so to the queens.

The official first gay pride march in London was the Carnival Parade on 1 July 1972. However a few days earlier, GLF had been allocated a timeslot with the Boilermakers Union to picket the US Embassy about what they were doing to Vietnam. Only the Radfems turned up, a band was playing, and Bette Bourne and Michael James started a waltz. The US school band packed up in a fit of pique. The queens sauntered off and ended up at Piccadilly Circus. The police asked where they, the queens and the rent boys, intended to go, and said they would escort the march which went via Oxford Street to Hyde Park.

By late 1973 the movement was almost over. Some of the surviving RadFems took over the anarchist Agitprop bookshop/commune at 248 Bethnal Green Road, which at one time had been owned by a banker to the Kray Brothers gang, and had a wall safe. Agitprop had been raided twice by the police in the two years that it had been open, and two of its members were on conspiracy-to-procure-firearms charges.

Agitprop had already sponsored the East London GLF and now the queens took over and renamed the building Bethnal Rouge. They actually continued the bookshop for several months. The local pub was freaked out when they first arrived, but as some of them could play piano, and others were good at singing, there was some degree of acceptance.

Bette Bourne did not join, being from the East End and not wishing to return. Michael James went to Amsterdam for a year. Andrew Lumsden left his job as a financial journalist at The Times and joined the commune; Julian Hows, expelled from school for his GLF activities, ended up managing the local Kentucky Fried Chicken but buying their chickens from the Tesco's supermarket across the street; Stephen Bradbury had walked away from a job at Midland Bank to join the queens when they lived in Notting Hill; Stuart Feather, one of the early queens, was involved.

By this time the GLF Office Collective, at 5 Caledonian Road, in the basement of Housemans Bookshop, had been taken over by a clique that was allied with the early Gay News but out of touch with the rest of Gay Lib. In October 1973 the Bethnal Rouge queens raided the office and took the files. Gay News responded with an article that went so far as equate drag queens and violence. However at the last GLF Think In at Sussex University that November opinions were more on the side of Bethnal Rouge, and that the Office Collective had ceased to be useful.

In February 1974 Bethnal Rouge was invited by Goldsmith College Gay Soc to give a Pre-Disco talk. Group 4 Total Security working for the College attacked them before they even spoke, and when Lewisham police arrived they were told that Bethnal Rouge had come to the disco to cause trouble. One queen needed hospital treatment; another who was head butted and lost two front teeth. One was arrested and later that night thrown through a glass door in the police station. The rest escaped. Shortly afterwards the commune were evicted from 248 Bethnal Green Road.

Julian Hows. P185 in It's Not Unusual' by Alkarim Jivani

I don't know of any of the Radical Feminists who later became women. Stuart Feather, Bette Bourne and Michael James became performers maintaining the spirit of Gay Liberation. Stuart later became a painter. Alaric Sumner became known as a poet. Cloud Downey works in theatre. Andrew Lumsden later became a tour guide and a painter. Julian Hows was in the press when he insisted on wearing the female uniform when working for London Underground, and is now an Aids survivor. Stephen Bradbury and Richard Chappel died of Aids in the early 1990s.  Some of these are featured in Kirk & Heath's Men in Frocks.

• Kris Kirk with photographs by Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press 1984: 95-107.
• Lisa Power. No Bath but Plenty of Bubbles: An Oral History of the Gay Liberation Front 1970-73. Cassell, 1995: 247-263,272-282.
• Stuart Feather. “A Brief History of the Gay Liberation Front”. Libcom. Nov 21 2007. http://libcom.org/library/brief-history-gay-liberation-front-1970-73.
• Helena Pozniak.  “The end of homophobic discrimination”.  The Independent, 16 June 2010.  www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/the-end-of-homophobic-discrimination-2001212.html

___________________________________________________________________________________

I arrived in London in April 1972 and started going to West London GLF in July, and later switched to South London GLF.  Power's book is basically the history of the all-London GLF  which I never actually went to, and thus never met, as far as I remember, any of the people mentioned above, although I certainly do remember meeting other people mentioned in Power's book, and bedded at least one of them.  They and I were probably at, at least some, of the same Gay Lib Dances, when I was just building up confidence to go out as female.  I certainly did not have the confidence to join a drag commune.

Peter Robinson (1962 - ) singer.

Peter was born in Kingston, Jamaica, where his father was a yacht salesman, and grew up in Hertfordshire. As a teenager he modelled himself on Marilyn Monroe.

Boy George and he, using the name, Marilyn, were Blitz Kids and part of the New Romantic movement. They lived in the same squat in Kentish Town, but were chased out by a lustful neighbour who assumed that Marilyn was a woman.

After Boy George went into Culture Club, Marilyn appeared in the Eurythmics’ video, Who’s That Girl. He was then signed and his first single, “Calling Your Name”, 1983, went to no 1 in Japan, and no 4 in the UK. He released two more singles in 1984, and his album, Despite Straight Lines in 1985.

In 1986 Marilyn and George’s brother, Kevin, were sentenced on a charge of possessing heroin. His career declined. A failed attempt to record a second album in Detroit drained his finances, and he cut his hair and quit the industry, until 2001 when he made some club appearances.

In 2002, his character was featured in the stage musical Taboo. In 2003 he was in a Channel 4 reality show based on hairdressing. In 2005 he was in the Channel 4 documentary Whatever Happened to the Gender Benders?, where, looking quite unwell and unglamorous, he discussed drugs and his agoraphobia.

*Not Peter Robinson, the crime novelist, nor the department store, nor the computer scientist, nor the poet.

• Kris Kirk & Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press. 159pp 1984:116-7.
• Andy Baybutt (dir). Whatever Happened to the Gender Benders? With Marc Almond, David Bowie, Boy George, Marilyn. UK 48 mins 2005 Channel 4.
• “Marilyn (singer)”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_(singer).
• "Marilyn".  The Blitz Kids.   www.theblitzkids.com/site_archive/sharahmakeup/menumarilyn.html.

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    

__________________________________________________________________________________

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.

George Alan O’Dowd (1961 - ) singer, DJ, onetime androgyne.

George was raised in Eltham, London by Irish parents.

As a participant in the New Romantic movement in the early 1980s he and his friend Marilyn (Peter Robinson) were noted for their androgynous dressing. Malcolm McLaren, who had run the Sex Pistols, arranged for Boy George, as he became known, to perform with Bow Wow Wow.
 
Shortly after George and three others formed Culture Club. The group took off and had singles and albums at the top of the charts.

George’s dress style resulted in him being regarded as the most famous transvestite of the period, but he frequently insisted in interviews that he did not wear female underwear, and that he was proud to be a man, with no need to be a woman. He claimed that his dressing was more like that of a priest. In his 1995 biography, he said: "I wanted people to know I was gay. In many people's eyes, I was the premier poof, the benchmark by which others would be measured”, although in the 1980s he had avoided admitting to being gay and had famously said that he prefered a ‘nice cup of tea’ to sex.

He developed a serious heroin addiction. Bandmate Michael Rudetski died of a heroin overdose. George’s brother David attempted to save his life by talking about the addiction on national television. In 1986 George was arrested for heroin possession.

His solo career after Culture Club was less successful. For a while he wrote songs under the name Angela Dust. He had a new hit with “The Crying Game”, released with the film in 1992. He started DJing and was asked to mix compilation discs by Fantazia and Ministry of Sound. In 2002/3 he starred in the musical Taboo, based on his own life, but playing a different character. The show lasted for two years.

In 2005, in New York, he called the police over a robbery and was arrested for cocaine possession. He was sentenced to garbage duty for ‘wasting police time’.

In 2008 he was convicted of assaulting and imprisoning a Norwegian prostitute in his home in east London. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison, but was released after 4, and was required to wear an ankle monitor for 90 days.

• Kris Kirk & Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press. 159pp 1984:112-3.
• Boy George and Spencer Bright. Take It Like a Man: The Autobiography of Boy George. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1995.
• Boy George and Paul Gorman. Straight. London: Century, 2005.
• Andy McSmith. “Boy George: A hero destroyed by drug 'degradation' “. The Independent. 17 Jan 2009. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/boy-george-a-hero-destroyed-by-drug-degradation-1418230.html.
• “Boy George”. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_George.
• www.boygeorgelive.com.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

I wasn't in London for New Romanticism, and never related to that phase of the rock-pop rainbow.

'Gender variance' is a wide term. That is why I chose it. Obviously George O'Dowd comes under the wide umbrella, even though his dressing up is only a phase that he passed through. However there is no rule that says that to be gender variant, you have to be so for life. I don't see O'Dowd as either a transvestite or a drag queen. He seems to be more of a theovestite (dressing (up) as a priest). Even in the '80s I was put off by his insistence that he wore male underwear under his frocks.

Some persons have complained that I included Rudy Guliani on this blog. Guliani is a lot closer to being transgender than O'Dowd is. And he does not go around insisting that he has male underwear under his skirts.

Letitia Winter (1948 - ) magician.

with the then Prime Minister.

Oliver Winter was born in Holloway, north London. He was in sales and then a motor-cycle messenger, worked as a lab assistant, and in fashion. 

She transitioned to Letitia in her 30s, finding a route through drag pubs, the Porchester Drag Balls and Friend TV/TS Group.  She decided to go into showbiz, but couldn’t sing, so she took up magic under the stage name of Fay Presto.

She has been a great success, and has performed for all senior royalty and many rock stars and actors.

She was the subject of a 1994 BBC profile, Illusions of Grandeur. In 1998 she was voted ‘Party Entertainer of the Year’ by Tatler Magazine. In 2001, she played herself in the ITV soap opera, Emmerdale. One of the few women members of The Inner Magic Circle.

She was on the board of the transsexual rights organization Press for Change.

• Kris Kirk and Ed Heath. Men In Frocks. London: Gay Men's Press. 1984: 78. 
• George Sally (dir). Illusions of Grandeur. BBC TV 40 mins 1994.
• Sasha Slater. “Kitchen Sink Drama: Fay Presto” The Express Saturday Magazine. 30 Oct-05 Nov 1999. Online at: www.pfc.org.uk/pfclists/news-arc/1999q4/msg00037.htm. 
• www.faypresto.com.