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Showing posts with label antiques. Show all posts
Showing posts with label antiques. Show all posts

27 November 2017

Diamond Lil (1935 – 2016) performer, antiques dealer, columnist

Phillip Forrester was born and raised in Savannah, Georgia. He was in drag at age 5, and as a child sang on Savannah radio.

At Halloween 1953, he and a drag friend got dolled up and crashed a party at a local American legion. Only after several drinks did it come out that they were not cis women. They quickly left but driving home they were followed by two soldiers who shot out a tire on their car, and Forrester was orally raped.
"It was so scary: there's no words for it. But I made a decision that night that I was out. A real weird way to come out, though."
The first public drag performance was at age 18. She was popular with sailors in the port and would perform on ships docked there. Eventually this led to Forrester being discharged from the Georgia Air National Guard, and fired from a secretarial job at the Seaboard Railroad. The Savannah police arrested her several times, once on a drummed-up loitering charge.

It was time to move and she arrived in Atlanta in 1965. At that time she had a husband, and they started a small antiques shop near Peachtree and 11th Streets. That area became ‘the Strip’ where bohemians and gays were to be found.

She dabbled in drag shows using the name Leslie Diamond. Jayne County wrote in her autobiography:
“It was considered a very big deal to go to straight clubs and pass as a woman, and there weren’t many of the queens who could pull it off. One who could was an older queen called Diamond Lil, who was the mother of all the young street queens in Atlanta.”
In 1968 a friend asked Diamond to headline a new drag show at Mrs P’s, a restaurant in the basement of the Ponce de Leon Hotel. There was an arrangement with the police: only on week-nights, and the show was not to be advertised. She took the name Diamond Lil as a last minute inspiration on the opening night. At first she mouthed to Motown records, but started singing with her own voice – one of only a few drag performers to do so.

For six months in 1970 there was a bar called the Club Centaur. Diamond and another drag artist, Phyllis Killer, performed backed by a live band. Diamond became known for her hard-driving rock’n’roll songs. She added in her own songs, and released them on 45s – some of them were played on jukeboxes across the city.

Diamond performed several times for the Georgia Gay Liberation Front. She also wrote, for the alternate weekly, The Great Speckled Bird, the first time after being caught in a police raid on a club in Savannah in 1970.
Diamond Lil, mid 1980s


In the early 1970s, Diamond moved to Sweet Gum Head, a focal point for the burgeoning drag scene. Other performers included Rachel Wells, Lavita Allen and Charlie Brown.

In 1972 Diamond did a benefit for the Committee on Gay Education at the University of Georgia and sang “Stand by Your Man.” UGA officials did all they could to throw the COGE off campus, but Lil’s support gave COGE financial backing and a public profile.

Diamond started a column in the gay paper, Sunset People, and then in the nightlife magazine, Cruise.





In 1984 Diamond Lil put out a full LP of original material, The Queen of Diamonds/Silver Grill. She was an acknowledged influence on  Lady Bunny and RuPaul who started out in Atlanta at this time. However, by then Diamond was losing her fans to AIDS. There were fewer places to perform, and she reduced her performances and concentrated on a new antiques business. She was writing for the bar magazine Etcetera – these articles were often obituaries.

In the 1990s she had a few revival shows. In 2002 she re-released her album on CD. She put out two more albums: Live at the Moonshadow Saloon, 2004, and Verge, Vigor and Vim, 2007. In 2014 the readers of the Georgia Voice newspaper voted her Best Icon; in 2015 Atlanta Pride and Touching Up Our Roots honored her in the first ever Our Founding Valentines event. After a struggle with cancer, Lil was moved into a hospice. She died age 80.

Lady Bunny is quoted in The Atlanta Journal Constitution:

"She was singing with a live band and I had never heard of a drag queen doing that. That really helped shaped my experience because it was not disco music, it was rock 'n' roll and it was original. What always interested me about Diamond Lil, she broke the boundaries of what most drag queens thought they could do. Most thought they could either lip sync or do a celebrity impersonation and she said no, I’m going to front a rock band and do original music...I did love the mock grandeur of her. I totally bought it, when you were in the same room with her, she was regal. She really was magic. She really was unique."




  • Diamond Lil. ‘Diamond Lil, Most Glamorous Queen in the World, In Captivity’. The Great Speckled Bird, 3, 38, September 28, 1970:10-11. Online.
  • Jayne County with Rupert Smith. Man Enough to be a Woman. Serpent's Tail, 1995: 29- 30, 160.
  • James T. Sears, Rebels, Rubyfruit, and Rhinestones: Queering Space in the Stonewall South. Rutgers University Press, 2001: 81, 159.
  • Tray Butler. “God save the Queen: If Diamond Lil is the grand dame of Atlanta drag, why can't she get a steady gig?” Creative Loafing, Oct 9, 2003. Online.
  • Wesley Chenault & Stacy Braukman. Gay and Lesbian Atlanta. Arcadia Pub, 2008: 55, 62
  • Patrick Saunders. “Atlanta drag icon Diamond Lil dies at 80”. Georgia Voice, August 9, 2016. Online.
  • Shane Harrison. “Pioneering Atlanta drag performer Diamond Lil has died”. The Atlanta Journal Constitution, August 10, 2016. Online.
Diamond Lil in The Great Speckled Bird      Discogs           RateYourMusic.
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Other Diamond Lils.


Honora Ornstein, from Austria-Hungary, performed during the Klondike Gold Rush in the 1890s.

Evelyn Hildegard, also from Austria-Hungary, performer in California and Nevada in early 20th century. Later a brothel keeper.

A 1928 play by Mae West, the basis of the 1933 film, She Done Him Wrong.

Katie Glass, a female wrestler in South Carolina in 1960s-1970s.

Trans woman performer in Hackney, London 1940s-1960s.

Marcus Craig New Zealand drag performer as Diamond Lil from 1972.

The 1970s rock group from Essex.
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23 October 2009

Dawn Langley Simmons (1922 – 2000) part 2: wife and mother.

Continued from Part 1.

After her two weddings, Mrs Simmons was now a pariah in Charleston. Much of this was a social freeze, but it also irrupted into catcalls, a crate set on fire, a dog poisoned.

She had spent a lot of money on the two weddings. She also bought John-Paul three or four fishing boats and three cars. The trove of art and antiques was being diminished.

The First Federal Savings and Loan, which held the mortgage on her house, announced that it would foreclose it she did not pay off the full loan immediately. This it did in April 1971, and the house was sold by public auction at a bargain price. They moved into a rented house in an unfashionable part of town.

John-Paul was having an affair with another woman, white-skinned but officially black, and made her pregnant. Her family said that she had enough children and her father made arrangements for Dawn to buy the baby. Dawn padded her stomach and phoned the Johns Hopkins Clinic to tell them that she was pregnant. Edgerton asked her to come in for a free examination, but she did not. The pregnant mother checked into hospital as Mrs John-Paul Simmons, and after the birth, 17 October 1971, her father gave the baby to Dawn. She phoned Edgerton again to announce that the baby had arrived.

With the original record of birth which listed Mrs John-Paul Simmons as the mother and her own papers in her married name, and the baby, Dawn registered the birth in Philadelphia while on a visit to her publishers. She called the child Natasha after the character in War and Peace. She was 49 at the time but claimed to be 34.

She also published her first autobiography, The Ballad of Dawn and John-Paul, the same year, in which she claimed to be a female intersex wrongly raised as a boy. The publisher changed the title to Man into Woman, which Dawn disliked.

John-Paul came and went as he chose. He had other lovers, and at least one other child. Dawn acquired bruises which she blamed on muggers and racists, but they seemed to happen only when John-Paul was around. She wrote to her husband:
My dear Johnny,
I am not upset with you as I know you were not yourself the other night. I have no money left. You know that and you destroyed all of my work when I couldn't give you $30 for your son. I shall never stop you from seeing Natasha as I love you and have always loved you. Nobody would love a man who has tried to kill them several times, gave them 45 stitches in their face, broke their nose, and cheekbone and ruined the eyesight in one eye. But I have never ever shut the door against you and you came back. You were the kindest man I ever knew before that woman ruined you with drink. I am eternally thankful to you for the most beautiful baby in Charleston. You don't have to live with us again Johnny; I don't think you can live with anybody.
In December 1973 she claimed that a masked white intruder threatened the baby, raped her and broke her arm. But she never reported this to the police.

She and Natasha fled to Catskill, New York, where she acquired a run-down historical house for a mere $200 binder. John-Paul Simmons left his other wife and child and followed. He took up sculpture and had some success. However he did drugs and drink and would go out in the snow barefoot. He was diagnosed as a schizophrenic, and delivered to the state mental hospital in Albany. He returned home several times, but committed minor thefts and assaults.

Dawn became an art teacher in a Catholic school and was reduced to writing for the National Enquirer. In 1981 she got an advance on her writing a biography of Margaret Rutherford, and moved with her daughter to nearby Hudson, New York. In 1982 she divorced Simmons, but continued to care for him.


In 1985, on a trip back to Charleston, she was an extra in the ABC/Warner Bros miniseries North and South.

Natasha in turn became a mother.

In 1995 Dawn published her third autobiography, Dawn, a Charleston Legend. Nigel Nicolson, the son of Vita and Harold, reviewed it positively in The Spectator:
“there is not a word of reproach for me in her book. Like everything else about Dinky, it is gallant, resilient and unfailingly generous”.
The publishers flew her to Charleston for book signings. Natasha and her children returned to Charleston that year, and Dawn followed two years later. As she aged, she suffered from Parkinson’s disease and osteoporosis. She died at home at age 77.

John-Paul remained in hospital in Albany. He was not informed of her death until Edward Ball tracked him down.  He died in 2012.

Dawn Simmons had written three autobiographies, over 20 celebrity biographies, novels and children’s books.
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In writing on Simmons, one has to choose: does one go with the story in Simmon’s three ( yes 3) autobiographies that she was really a girl mis-assigned at birth, and that Natasha was a child of her body, or does one go with Edward Ball with his thorough fact checking and interviewing of almost everybody who knew her?

Certainly we can see Dawn being economical with the truth: she deducts 15 years from her age; she claims that she was treated at the women’s clinic rather than the Gender Identity Clinic at Johns Hopkins University Hospital; that Isabel Whitney was a cousin; that she was raped and assaulted by a mafia thug hired by Albert Goldman (only in Jack Hitt’s later version); and that she was descended from Spanish nobility on her mother’s side.  She says nothing about a sex life before transition, but Ball is able to find gay men who had been with Gordon, and the 1959 novella is consistent with Gordon being a gay man at that time. If Gordon had been  intersex, the testimony of the Charleston gay men would be different, as would that of Dr Milton Edgerton.

Then there is the question of finances. Many people blur the facts of their own finances, but if Isabel Whitney did leave over $1 million (equivalent to over $7 million today) to Gordon, where did it all go? Why did Gordon need a mortgage to buy the house in Charleston? Yes, John-Paul wasted some of it on boats and cars. But what happened to the 40-room mansion in New York? Was it turned into apartments? Did Gordon or Dawn sell their interest? There is no discussion of moving back there after being driven out of Charleston. While Dawn talks of poverty, of selling antiques and jewellery for a pittance, of accepting charity and then getting on the food-stamps program, she then flies to London with Natasha, takes a taxi (not a bus or a train) from Heathrow to central London and stays at the Hotel Washington. The hotel is still going: it is in Mayfair, close to Park Lane and Green Park. Here is its web site and rates. Rooms today start at £325 a day. Quite a splashing out for someone on welfare. All for Love finishes mysteriously when she escapes welfare in Charleston by buying a historic house in the Catskills. Ball says that she got it for $200 down, but this still seems odd.

Their marriage was blessed in an Anglican church in England. This is, of course, the same Anglican Church which demanded an exception in the Gender Recognition Act, 2004, so that it could refuse to marry transsexuals.

I was quite impressed that the African Methodist Episcopal Church was so accepting of Dawn.   I hope that that is still true today.

What to my mind is Dawn’s first big achievement is that she was a working-class child who managed to become a well-known writer. She herself does not seem to be proud of that.  She drops hints to Jack Hitt that she was an unrecognized aristocrat and frequently drops the names of the rich and titled. On the other hand, she never even once mentions another transsexual, not even Christine Jorgensen or April Ashley. Did she get her UK birth certificate re-issued before Corbett v. Corbett stopped the process in 1969? She seems as lonely in her gender journey as was Agnes.

Re the Harley St gynaecologist.  There is a Elliot Elias Philipp who wrote Childlessness: its Causes and What to do About them, and co-authored Scientific Foundations of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, 1970.

I bought my copy of The Peninsula of Lies through Amazon Marketplace. My copy is stamped Charleston County Library, S.C.

The anecdote with Carson McCullers is found in her biography by Virginia Carr.  Both Ball and Hitt repeat it with variations, without citing this source.  It seems that it was also repeated as gossip in Charleston.

There is an entry for Dawn in Wikipedia (here).  You may like to compare it with what is written here.  The authors of the entry accept her reduction of her age by 15 years, mention nothing about her pre-transition sex life, and refer to her as 'Simmons' (never Mrs Simmons) even before she met Mr Simmons, even when she was a child.
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21 October 2009

Dawn Langley Simmons (1922- 2000) part 1: celebrity biographer, antiques dealer.

Gordon Kenneth Ticehurst was born to an unmarried teenager in the village of Heathfield, Sussex. He was raised by his grandmother. His mother subsequently married, and she and her husband were servants at Sissinghurst in Kent, the home of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson. Gordon visited his mother at Sissinghurst where he was known as Dinky. In later life he would compare his own life to Orlando, the magic-sex-change novel written by Vita’s lover Virginia Woolf, and based on Vita.

At 17 he re-registered his birth with his mother’s husband listed as his father. He started using the name Gordon Langley Hall, Hall being his grandmother’s maiden name.

In 1946 Gordon did a year as a teacher on an Ojibwe reservation at Lake Nipigon in north-western Ontario. He returned to England and taught for two years in Croydon, and did some society journalism.

In 1950 he emigrated to the US and became society editor for The Nevada Daily Mail in Missouri. In 1952 he became a society columnist for the New York suburban Port Chester Daily Item. One evening he attended an art showing and took up with the artist Isabel Whitney (1878 – 1962), a descendant of Eli Whitney (1765 – 1825), the inventor of the cotton gin. Gordon moved into her 40-room mansion on West 10th Street and became her companion.

In 1955 he published Me Papoose Sitter based on his experiences with the Ojibwe. In 1957 his play about interracial same-sex love between soldiers, Saraband for a Saint, was performed in Harlem, and attracted celebrity attention. He also started a career as a celebrity biographer with books on US first ladies and British royalty, and through colleagues on the Villager newspaper was able to meet the actress Bette Davis (1908 – 1989).

In 1959 he wrote a never-published 150-page novella about a 40-year-old writer who picks up a 19-year-old man and makes him his secretary and lover. The young man eventually leaves, and later the older man strangles him and goes to death row.

In 1960 Gordon met the noted actress Margaret Rutherford (1892 – 1972), then 68. Rutherford and her husband Stringer Davis(1899 –1973) adopted Hall two years later, as they had done with three other adults.

As Isabel aged, she and Gordon decided to buy a pink stucco house in the gay area of Charleston, North South Carolina, but she died before they could move. Hall flew her body to Heathfield for burial, although she had never been there in life. Whitney left him an estate reportedly worth over $1 million.

Gordon renovated the house in Charleston, filled it with antiques, and became part of Charleston society. In 1963 the aging Carson McCullers visited Charleston and met Gordon at a party. She is reputed to have taken him aside and said to him: “You are really a little girl”.

Dawn and John-Paul
Not being married, Gordon did not really fit in with the Charleston gay scene, but he cruised the nearby bus station. At a time when Charleston white gay men rarely went with black men, Gordon was smitten when he met the 18-year-old John-Paul Simmons (1948 – 2012).

Hall first courted John-Paul as a man, but without success, and then as a woman. She persuaded John-Paul to start living in her house. By 1967 Hall had been accepted in the new Gender Clinic at Johns Hopkins University Hospital.  John-Paul went with her to the Clinic. Dr Milton Edgerton told her that the operation would be a mistake, but they would do it if she insisted.

John-Paul left her, but came back when she said that she would not have the operation, but then she had it anyway in 1968. She was one of the first to have surgery with Dr Howard Jones under the Johns Hopkins program. She changed her name to Dawn Pepita Langley Hall (Pepita was the grandmother of Vita Sackville-West).

John-Paul left her again, and again she pestered him to return. Dawn had to hire a lawyer to persuade the judge to issue a marriage license. On the license she claimed to be 31. South Carolina still had a law forbidding interracial marriage, but a similar law in Virginia had been struck down by the US Supreme Court (Loving v. Virginia 1967). The engagement photograph was printed in the UK on the front page of the News of the World. The marriage was held in their home on 22 January 1969 presided over by a pastor from the Shiloh African Methodist Episcopal Church of which Dawn had recently become the sole white member.

Dawn with Margaret Rutherford
It was international news featured in the New York Times, Newsweek, the black weekly, Jet, and the tabloid, National Insider; the Japanese tabloid Shukan Shincho, and in the UK, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express and the Sussex Express. The People paid her ₤3750 for a series on her life, and supported her claim to have been examined by a Harley Street surgeon (Dawn later said that this was Dr Elliot Phillip) who said that she had been wrongly sexed at birth and was capable of becoming pregnant. She was also on radio and television in the UK and Canada, but not in the US where her story was too hot.

Dawn’s mother died, and Mr and Mrs Simmons planned a visit to her grave. Margaret Rutherford enabled a blessing of their marriage in an Anglican church in Hastings, Kent.

Continued in Part 2.
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10 February 2009

Lauren Harries (1978 - ) antiques retailer, television personality.

James Harries was raised in Cardiff, Wales. From the age of five, James had collected china and knick-knacks from car-boot sales and second-hand shops. He found a piece of porcelain that was valued at several thousand pounds.


He became famous at age 10 when, curly-haired and bow-tied, he appeared on Terry Wogan’s BBC television chat show, where he demonstrated a precocious knowledge of antiques.

The family opened an antique shop. Three years later his family publishing company released his book on making money by spotting bargains. He left school at age 11, being home-tutored from then on.

After a fire at one of the family properties, his father was jailed for filing a false insurance claim, and all the family businesses failed. As James matured he was employed in a series of low paid jobs, but never lasted.

He started cross-dressing in 1997 and changed his name to Lauren. Lauren has said that a casual remark in a supermarket, that 'he should be a woman', helped her realize that that was what she wanted. She had surgery in 2001, followed by daytime television appearances.

The actor, Keith Allen, made a documentary in 2004 about the family. They told him that they are marriage counsellors, with a sideline in private investigation, and that all the family are Doctors of Metaphysics. Allen discovered that the degrees are sold on the Internet, and that Lauren’s counselling for transition was done by her mother. It also seems that 10-year-old James was not so much a child prodigy as a child well coached by his patents.

The Harrieses had had long-running problems with their neighbours, and on 8 July 2005, a gang of young men assaulted Lauren, her father and her brother Mark.

Her brother holds the world record for baking the largest Yorkshire pudding.

Lauren has become a minor television personality, appearing in Trust Me … I’m a Beauty Therapist and Big Brother’s Big Mouth. It was rumoured that she would be in Celebrity Big Brother, but then said that she would not participate because she could not bring medical supplies needed by a post-operative.

She has converted to Buddhism. In 2008 she was a cover girl for the magazine Transliving.

*Not the UK singer, nor the Canadian painter, who both use different spellings.
EN.WIKIPEDIA
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