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Aleshia Brevard
Aleshia Brevard, as she is now known, underwent gender confirmation surgery in Los Angeles in 1962, one of the first such operations in the United States. (The famous gender disori...view moreAleshia Brevard, as she is now known, underwent gender confirmation surgery in Los Angeles in 1962, one of the first such operations in the United States. (The famous gender disorientation pioneer, Dr. Harry Benjamin, broke news of their son’s transsexual diagnosis to Brevard's astonished parents.)
Under the stage name Lee Shaw, Brevard worked as a drag queen at Finocchio's, a San Francisco nightclub, doing Marilyn Monroe impersonations. (Like Marilyn, she thrived on romance and had a string of entanglements with men.) Later, she worked as a stripper in Reno and as a Playboy Bunny at the Sunset Strip hutch. After playing opposite Don Knotts in the movie The Love God in 1969, Brevard appeared in 7 more films during her career. After breaking into TV as a regular on the Red Skelton Show, in the early 1970s she appeared in 37 television productions and over 50 stage shows and tours. She created the role of Tex on the daytime soap opera One Life To Live. Brevard was America’s first transsexual actress to appear in prime time television, even though her gender history was never made public.
Following her theatrical career, Brevard returned to teach theater at East Tennessee State, the same university she had attended as a boy.
Her memoir is a rare pre-Women's Movement account of coming to terms with gender identity. Brevard writes frankly about the degree to which she organized her life around pleasing men, and how absurd it all seems to her now.view less