A Gender Variance Who's Who

Part I: Atlanta
Part II: New York City
Part III:  London and Berlin

Wayne debuted at London's Roxy in March 1977, and renamed the band to The Electric Chairs. New Musical Express journalist Julie Burchill (who in later years would express anti-trans opinions) was very supportive of the band. They were the only punk act at the Reading Festival that year and played to an antagonistic audience.

After a gig with Adam and the Ants, Wayne was introduced to Derek Jarman who cast her as a transvestite rock star in his film Jubilee.

Safari Records signed the group who put out their first album, although the more controversial tracks were kept apart for a special EP, Blatantly Offenzive. Wayne's transition can be seen on the album covers of the first three albums. On The Electric Chairs, 1978, Wayne has a masculine appearance; on Man Enough to be a Woman, 1978, the two personae are juxtaposed; on Things Your Mother Never Told You, 1979, there is only a feminine version.


The second album, which was also issued under the name Storm the Gates of Heaven, contains "Man enough to be a Woman" but also songs against organized religion as well as a statement about County's belief in a god.

"When we recorded the second album, I was beginning to feel very strongly that I wanted to take the transsexual thing a lot further; I'd stopped doing hormones for a while and really toned down my appearance, but I wasn't happy with that. I'd got a lot of attention with the Electric Chairs, and I decided it was time to come out and be the first up-front transsexual in a rock band. The music press was really interested and supportive for a while; they'd never had this before, and they could see me changing right before their very eyes."(p126)

After a European tour for the second album, County stopped in West Berlin for a fortnight before returning to London for a nose job. However she ran into the wrong immigration official, was detained overnight and returned to West Berlin.

There, she was introduced to Romy Haag and her club. She had her nose done by a doctor on the Kurfürstendamm, who had worked on several trans women. When County returned to England at the end of Summer 1978, press reports suggested that she had had the full sex change, but she tired of explaining and let people assume as they liked.

"It bothered people. There was a distinct cooling of attitude, even among the fans; underneath that liberal attitude exterior, a lot of punk fans were really straight-down-the-line conservatives, and they hated the fact that I was actually living out the implications of my songs. Some of them even said 'You've betrayed your sex'." (p131)

Late in the year the band went to a farm in Wales to write the third album. Things Your Mother Never Told You came out to good reviews and was followed by a gruelling tour of Europe.

In Late summer 1979, Wayne fled to New York and decided that it was time to change her name to Jayne. She founded a new band, played CBGBs and toured. She also toned down her appearance.

Early 1980 Jayne returned to West Berlin to be in a play with Romy Haag. The play was a success, but Jayne and Romy fell out and remained so for many years. Jayne lived with PJ from San Francisco who had been in the Angels of Light before moving to West Berlin. However PJ decided not to continue as a woman and after being sacked by Romy returned to living as a male, and then her Turkish boyfriend did not want her any more.

"It was during my time in Berlin that I came closest to the idea of having a full sex change; it certainly would have been easy enough to arrange, and it's what everyone expected me to do. … The only reason that I can see for having the full change is so that you can move to a different town and marry a man and live completely as a woman, without anyone ever knowing what you are. But I don't think I could do that. Let's face it, if people know you're a sex change you'll never be accepted as a woman. … I'm happy in between the sexes; I'm comfortable and I actually like the idea. … I certainly wouldn't be happy with idea of being a man, and I don't consider myself a man, but I'm not going to try and convince myself that I'm really a woman." (p138-9)

Jayne was friends with Zazie de Paris (Solange Dymenzstein). She starred in Rock & Roll Peepshow. She also did a St Patricks Day concert at a US Army Base.

Jayne was introduced to the Latvian-born director Rosa von Praunheim and was cast in the film Stadt der Verlorenen Seele (City of Lost Souls) 1982 with Angie Stardust and Tara O'Hara.

In 1983, Leee arranged a gig in New York, and Jayne put on Rock & Roll Peepshow at the Pyramid, which led to the show Les Girls with Holly Woodlawn and Alexis del Lago, and International Chrysis.

Then Jayne returned to Germany for the City of Lost Souls tour, which was followed bt time in London where she was booked at the Fridge in Brixton, and she encountered Alan/Lanah Pelley during his transsexual phase.

She stayed in England until 1987. She recorded a couple of albums but they were not promoted.

On return to New York, Jayne took up with drag performer Constance Cooper, who introduced her to Sally's Hideaway off Times Square.

Jayne had not been home for 20 years. She phoned her mother and proposed a visit. She got a gig at Atlanta's Club Rio and attempted to find those she knew from the 1960s, but could find only Diamond Lil. She was introduced to the rising stars RuPaul and Deandra Peak.

To visit her parents she really dressed down. She ended up staying the summer.

"However much I may be Jayne County, my old personality, Wayne, is still there; it never goes away. … Jayne County is the one who's out there hustling and trying to do something with her career. But when I get home alone I can't wait to get the wig and make-up off, to put on an old t-shirt and my reading glasses and read my religious books or my history books or a horror novel, to eat cookies and drink tea." (p164-5)

Afterwards Jayne did a gig in Tel Aviv, and then returned to London for another four years. She became a regular at the Apollo Club in Wardour Street, where she met met old-time transvestites such as Francis Bacon, the painter.

She returned to New York at the end of 1992, and was in the Wigstock film, 1995. Her autobiography Man Enough to be a Woman came out the same year.

In 2014 Jayne was banned from Facebook for using the word 'tranny' a word that she has been using for 40 years. She spoke back in an article in Queerty:

"Tranny is not a slur word and I resent anyone trying to make it one. It’s the intent behind the word, rather than the word itself, that can be sometimes offensive. It may be a silly word, but it’s certainly not worthy enough to be banned. That is censorship, pure and simple and no better than right-wing Christian extremists or any other tyrants, who want to force their narrow-minded, conservative opinions on others."

Jayne has also been posting controversial opinions on FaceBook and on her blog,   rockandrollantirepublikkkanleague.    An article in Haaretz interprets them as simple support for Israel, but they are also anti-Republican.  

• "Rock on the Wayne!". Melody Maker, 6 October 1973.
  
• Pete Silverton. “A Self-Made Woman”. Sounds. 2 June 1979
  
• Jayne County with Rupert Smith. Man Enough to be a Woman. London: Serpent's Tail, 1995.
  
• Jim White. "Sometimes it's hard to be a woman ". The Independent, 19 June 1995. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/sometimes-its-hard-to-be-a-woman-1587170.html.
  
• Kris Kirk. “From Wayne to Jayne” A Boy Called Mary: Kris Kirk’s Greatest Hits. Brighton: Millivres Books. 1999.
• "Why was transgender punk icon Jayne County banned from Facebook?". Dangerous Minds, 04.23.2014. http://dangerousminds.net/comments/why_was_transgender_punk_icon_jayne_county_banned_from_facebook.
  
• Jayne County. "EXCLUSIVE: Transgender Icon Jayne County Is Fed Up With Being Banned And Censored". Queerty, Jun 5, 2014. www.queerty.com/exclusive-transgender-icon-jayne-county-is-fed-up-with-being-banned-and-censored-20140605.
  
• Marisa Fox-Bevilacqha. "Famed Transgender Performer Stands Up for Israel" Haaretz, Aug 02, 2014. www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/.premium-1.608412.
  

www.jaynecounty.com    EN.Wikipedia    QMH   ArtofExmouth    IMDB      rockandrollantirepublikkkanleague      FaceBook     


German television, Rockpalast 19/12/1978

Chloe as Keith was a teenage champion equestrian in Connecticut.

Chloe moved to Manhattan's East Village in 1982. She briefly worked at Studio 54. She became the ad director at the art magazine, East Village Eye, at a time when the local art scene was taking off. She became the partner of Bobby Bradley, one of the founders of the drag club, Pyramid, and was with him for nine years until he died of AIDS.

Chloe wrote and performed in a band with Antony Hegarty, and was the lead singer for the punk band, Transisters, which did songs about sexual abuse and being transgender.

She was photographed by Nan Goldin, Alice O'Malley, and Tanyth Berkeley, and also by David Armstrong, Steven Klein, and Michael Sharky. She was diagnosed as HIV+ in 1987, and later suffered from avascular necrosis. In 1993 she completed her transition to Chloe.

In 1995 she was in the Wigstock movie. She also acted in Visiting Desire, 1996, Gang Girls 2000, 1999, and Rock Star, 2004.

She was a long-time volunteer at the LGBT Community Center's Gender Identity Project. She was also part of Transsexual Menace, and directed one of the first federally funded HIV prevention program for transgender sex workers in 1997.

Chloe studied at the Parsons School of Design, and completed an associate degree in Gender Studies at the City University of New York in 1999.

Chloe encountered much ignorance and sheer prejudice by health professionals treating trans persons even when the problem was neither HIV nor specifically trans issues, including sudden dropping of treatment and refusals to answer.

As she was an AIDS activist, Mayor Bloomberg put her on New York’s HIV planning board, where she pushed to separate trans from gays in the HIV statistics.

Still an avid equestrian, Chloe launched Equi-Aids, a charity that gave inner-city kids the experience of horseback riding.

She was on the cover of POZ magazine in August 2004 as "Trannie get your gun", a theme that she proposed. In the article she declined to identify as female, preferring to stay outside the 'binary gender construct'.

Later that year she had the hip replacement required by her avascular necrosis.

In the L Magazine in 2006 she is quoted:

“I don’t get into political discussions at dinner often anymore, cause I want to embrace everyone no matter what. ‘Political’ for me is when I walk out of my house. If I can make an impact with my allies who share my views and/or pose questions to people, then that is maybe the best I can do politically. Love seems to be political to me these days, and has for many years. That loving somebody is so political, is such a heartbreaking truth.”

In 2007 she married trans man, performer T De Long (Chloe being legally a man and T a woman). She was rebuilding relationships with her family. Her visual art was becoming known, even internationally. In January 2011 she co-curated an exhibition of trans art, including some of her own drawings.

She was living at an HIV/AIDS residence and her prescription dosage had been raised after a brief hospitalization. She left around 2.00 am, wandered into a closed subway station and ended up underneath a service train. She was aged 50.

Here is one of her poems:

Ain’t nothing like knowin’ what it feels like…when you slip thru the cracks of society, political niceties, political correctness, health care, housing, employment, wealth, shoe stores, subways, family outings, holidays,
systems, systems, Systems. Ain’t nothing like knowing these facts deep in one’s bones. When you’re transsexual.
Ain’t nothing like knowing triumph over all of these adversities.”

• Mike Lavers. "Transgendered face health Crisis". The New York Blade, Aug 27, 2004.
• Rebecca Minnich. "Don't Mess With These Girls". POZ, August 2004. www.poz.com/articles/157_370.shtml.
• Susan Ryan “Community of ‘Whatevers’: stories of the city”. The L Magazine. Nov 22, 2006. www.thelmagazine.com/newyork/community-of-whatevers/Content?oid=1137267.
• Tim Murphy. "In Memoriam: Chloe Dzubilo, 1960-2011". POZ, March 4, 2011. http://blogs.poz.com/timmurphy/2011/03/memoriam_chloe_dzubilo.html. 

______________________

Revised January 2014.

Billy Schumacher was raised in Brooklyn. A performer noted for her beauty, Billy became Chrysis from the age of twelve, and was soon entering pageants and performing. She took up with Kim Christy. They shared an apartment in Manahattan below Houston Street. They met sex magazine pioneer and editor of Exotique magazine, Lenny Burtman, who arranged photo-shoots and other favors. Chrysis and Kim appeared together in Female Mimics.  They had uncredited mufti cameos in the chorus line of the film, The Queen, 1968.

By the mid-70s Chrysis was a drag celebrity, and had performed at the Jewel Box Review and other major venues, including in Europe, especially Berlin and she was a long-time friend of Salvador Dali.   In 1976 she was on the cover of Whitehouse, the UK magazine named antagonistically after the anti-porn crusader. Despite the claim on the cover that "This Woman is a Man", that was the first time that an out trans woman was on a magazine cover.

In 1982 she was the woman in the Van Halen video to their cover of "(Oh) Pretty Woman".  She reveals herself herself as a non-standard women by taking off her wig.  It played a few times on MTV but was pulled after complaints about the non-consensual fondling by little people.



Many accounts mention that she was a sexual top with the New Jersey college boys that she liked to pick up.

She headlined in Jesus Chrysis Superstar and The Last temptation of Chrysis. She was in the drag acting troupe, Hot Peaches, was to be found at the Pyramid Club and performed at Wigstock.

Her best-known movie role was as a witness to be eliminated in Q & A, which was released in 1990, a month after she died, at age 39, from cancer caused by the seepage of silicon from her breasts. Her friend, the singer Pete Burns, named one of his groups, International Chrysis, after her.

The documentary Split was actually proposed by Chrysis herself, but not completed until after her death.

*Not the powerboat racer.

• "This is Chrysis". In George Alpert. The Queens. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975.  
• Ellen Fisher Turk & Andrew Weeks (dir). Split: William to Chrysis: Portrait of a Drag Queen. Scr: Dan Chayefshy. US 60 mins 1992. Special Jury Award at the Berlin Film Festival.
• Laurence Senelick. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre. London & New York: Routledge xvi, 540 pp 2000: 433.
• “International Chrysis”. Endless Night.  Online. 
• Jim Beaux.  "International Chrysis".   The Transsexual Erotica Archive of Magazines and Films, 05 August 2013.  

 ____________________________________________________________

Jim Beaux' article contains: "Kim Christy's commentary points out that when she was in hospital dying, she hated the fact that the staff used her male name. She had a couple of roles where she portrayed a woman, who at the end would pull her hair off to reveal a man, and she disliked the endings both times."   This raises the question: what was her female name, as opposed to her performance name?  As with Sir Lady Java, we have a male name and a performance name.  But the female name, the one that was presumably on her driving licence and tax return, that is, her real name, remains unknown.