April Ashley: Britian's First Trans Woman

 

April Ashley: Portrait Of A Lady' explored the life Of Britain's First Transgender Icon , a wonderful exhibit across the pond last month, one that I would have loved to have seen. I do hope they decided to travel it around. She was quite the character and really made some GLBT history.

She bewitched Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Elvis Presley and INXS front man Michael Hutchence. And at the age of 78, and she still looks regal and pretty incredible, April Ashley still has the power to stop men in their tracks. But the first Briton to have full sex-change surgery admits to an unusual crush. She always fancied Labour’s ex-deputy Prime Minister, her old friend John Prescott. They worked together in the 1950s, He was a commis chef and  April  was in charge of the bar and restaurant. Over the years April and John, now Lord Prescott, have kept in touch. But they had not seen each other for many years before he opened an exhibition of photos covering her extraordinary life. April says' “I am so touched that John came to open the exhibition,” she says. Speaking of the incident when her old pal thumped an egg-throwing protester, she reveals: “I was dying to tell him that if someone threw an egg at me I would have decked them too. But I’d have done it with my handbag!”

April’s still-elegant appearance in her late 70s gives no clue to the struggles of her early life when she was born as George Jamieson in the slums of Liverpool. April goes on to say in an interview “It was a tough life at the beginning, very tough indeed,” she says. “I couldn’t tell anyone I felt I should have been born a girl. “My mother wouldn’t speak to me. When I would go shopping with her, people would say to her ‘What is it?’ My brothers and sisters wouldn’t speak to me. “I was brought up a strict Roman Catholic so I would talk to God all the time and beg to wake up as a girl.” At 14. George ran away to join the Merchant Navy, trying to prove his masculinity. But what followed were years of soul-searching, suicide bids, and even electric shock treatment in a mental hospital. At 20, after working in a Welsh hotel with John Prescott, she moved to Paris– and became April. She was the compere of a drag club, Le Carrousel, and won the attention of famous men. Artists Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso wanted her as their muse, and Elvis Presley bought her champagne every time he saw her.

 

 

Then in 1960 another star of Le Carrousel went to Casablanca to have sex-change surgery. At 25, April realised that her dream of becoming a woman could come true. The surgeon was Dr Georges Burou, the French gynaecologist who invented gender reassignment surgery. After saving up the £3,000 she needed – equivalent to £60,000 today – April went to Casablanca too. Dr Burou  had asked her ‘How come a beautiful girl like you wants to be a boy?’ So she put her passport in front of him and he couldn’t believe it. He told her to come in that night and they would do the operation the next day. No nonsense, no psychiatrists. Despite the risks of the seven-hour operation she was not scared as she wanted to live her life as a woman. April was also one of Dr Burou’s guinea pigs. He was quite plain about that.  April had to sign forms in case she died, and she almost did.

 

 

After recuperating in Casablanca, she moved to London. It was the Swinging 60s and she was was quick to embrace it, where she says it was a very promiscuous time. Her past unknown, April became Vogue’s most popular underwear model, and rose threw the modeling ranks, and beat 400 other girls to win a role alongside Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in their film, The Road to Hong Kong. But in 1961 a friend told the world her secret.She would have had a good career had it all not come out. April didn’t get much work after that as nobody would employ her.

At 50 she moved to America and took jobs as a waitress or a hostess. But when her past caught up the jobs disappeared. April has been married twice and says that on a trip to Australia in 1982 she was seduced by Michael Hutchence of INXS. “He came in to my hotel with his entourage an asked if I would like to go to his room for a bottle of champagne. "So I went up and he was the most beautiful man, so elegant. We had a lovely night together.”

Her private life was a mixture of glamour and strife -- she was a partner in a restaurant business and she claimed to have had dalliances with Omar Shariff and Grayson Perry. At the same time she worked as a hostess here and a waitress there without much financial security. Nevertheless, she remained an oft-watched celebrity, breaking taboos along the way until she was awarded a MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), a coveted honor bestowed upon her for her advocacy work in LGBT rights with the UK-based group, Homotopia.It was not until the Gender Recognition Act became law in 2005 that she was legally recognised as female and given a new birth certificate. And in September 2013 she was back in her home town for the opening of her exhibition.For someone with such a remarkable history she is refreshingly modest. As she was quoted saying...“I was always astonished that wherever I went people wanted to meet me,” she says. “I would always be in a quiet corner at parties then after a few drinks people would be queueing up.

“Still, it hasn’t been an easy life. You have to be resilient. You can’t let people crush you.”

 

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