IN THREE WORDS

In this weekly feature, I'll share a guest with you all each week, 

and you tell me in only three words what come to mind.

In Three Words...

April Ashley 

TRAILBLAZERS

 

The LGBTQ community is one of strength, resilience and beauty. As we celebrate Pride this month and always in June it's important to remember those of the Stonewall Uprising among many others who were brave enough to be outspoken, and brave enough to live their lives and not be hushed. Today, as we celebrate Pride, we know that recognizing a community so beautiful, diverse, and resilient isn't just reserved for one month of the year, because a community isn't reserved for a moment in time because creating an inclusive and equitable society is not reserved for a moment in time. It's an ongoing fight for a world where all people-are valued and treated with respect. In celebration of the month, here is some of my list of trailblazers we should know, who came before us, and helped pave the way for getting us today a better life, acceptance, and civil rights in some form or other, and refused to run and hide. You can also check out this month's In Three Words too.

Marsha P Johnson

Miss Marsha was right on the frontline of the Stonewall Uprising and was one of the most vocal that night when the raid took place. She took no shit. Though she was practically one step from a street person, she was always very vocal and involved in civil rights and formed the Gay Liberation Front. Marsha was extremely frustrated with the absence of the trans community's rights in the conversation. Her and good friend Slyvia Rivera were both the founders of the Street Transvestite Activists Revolutionaries, a safe place and home for young trans who lived on the street.

Slyvia Rivera

I'm amazed at how many don't know who she is. She has a unique place in LGBT history as not only a trans woman but also a Latina who helped lead the charge on the night of the Stonewall riots in NYC. While Rivera had a very turbulent life, she always led charges, protests, would never back down and was quoted as saying "I'm not missing a moment of this-it's the revolution!" Yet she remains little known even in our community, and at one point was even whitewashed out of a recent movie about Stonewall in favor of a fictional white character. Mind you she was only 19 when she and Marsha founded the STAR home.

Bayard Rustin

Bayard was an openly gay Black man, and first worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr in the civils rights movement before turning his attention to LGBT rights. In fact, he was a key player in organizing the March on Washington. As with most societal issues, he brought to light the intersectionality of economic equality within the civil rights movement and the need for social rights for the LGBT.

Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk finally proved a gay man could get elected...and made history when he became one of the first openly gay officials in the US in 1977 when he was elected to San Francisco's Board of Supervisors...and went to do a lot of good things for the community till his assassination.

Barbara Gittings

Hailed as being one of the longest-serving and the most fearless activists in the lesbian community, Gittings founded the New York chapter of The Daughters of Bilitis, picketed the White House in the 60's numerous times, and set up and helped counsel gay people who were discriminated by the government.

Jewel Box Revue

WAY before Drag Race there was the spectacular Jewel Box Revue. In 1939, during a time when gay people were viewed as abhorrent subversive and a threat to society, two gay lovers, Danny Brown and Doc Benner created and produced America's first racially and in your face inclusive traveling revue of all female impersonators and drag queens. Surprisingly it was a hit, and tickets were often hard to get and sold out. Many famous people were often seen in its audiences. The revue launched and made nationally famous the careers of Laverne Cummings, Lynne Carter, Mr. Titanic, Jan Britton, and the fabulous Guilda, who later took Paris by storm. Not to mention Storme De Laviere, the only female who was a drag king with the revue. I've done to many posts to mention about the Jewel Box.

Larry Kramer

Larry Kramer was a high-profile, high-volume, one-man crusade against the AIDS disease and a titan of activism and protest. Kramer was known as the founder of Act-Up, whose collective organizing pushed for more AIDS drugs research and an end to discrimination against the gay community. When he founded the organization in 1987, the AIDS epidemic was devasting the gay community.

Gladys Bentley

Gladys was a wildly popular singer, pianist and entertainer during the Harlem Renaissance and her career skyrocketed at Harry Hansberry's Clam House, a speak easy in the 1920's. But this Blues singers, who often sang her own raunchy lyrics to popular songs, was also black, lesbian, tough, and one of the very first drag kings around, dressing as a man 24/7 and reportedly married her lover publicly in 1931. Enough said.

Barbara Jordan

In 1972, Jordan became the first southern black female, and closeted Lesbian elected to the US House of Representatives. Although she never came out publicly, those she knew and worked , and friends and family, were aware, and she was with her partner Nancy Earl for 20 years. Yet we don't hear of her extraordinary accomplishment.

April Ashley

April Ashley was a pioneering model, socialite and a major key figure in trans history. She is well known for being outed in the press in the early 60's for her divorce case, and her work towards transgender equality when little was even known about it. In the 30's she was among one of the earliest people known to have had sex reassignment surgery. Now that is making new territory not to mention brave.

Allan Horsfall

These days he's often called the grandfather of the gay rights movement, for openly campaigning as a gay man when homosexuality was still extremely illegal. In 1964 he and a group of friends set up the North West Homosexual Law Reform Committee, even giving out his home address as the base for the organization. To be SO open at that time was very brave.

We must always remember them and their work and bravery.

Happy Pride!!!!!

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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