Rubies and Lemons

    April Ashley was born George Jamieson, in the Liverpool slums, in 1935. From the age of three George knew that he was really a girl. There were six siblings. It was a squalid, violent existence. His mother took a violent dislike to her effeminate son and regularly whipped him; she would also hold him by the feet and knock his head on the ground.  Little George was bullied relentlessly for his feminine good looks. Boys would tie him up and bash him. When shopping with is mother people would refer to him as ‘it’. This instilled in him the dreadful knowledge that some people were considered to be freaks. At eleven he was raped by a friend of the family and severely injured.     When he was fourteen he joined the merchant navy. At the same time he noticed that he was developing breasts. This proved traumatic and in a trough of depression he attempted suicide by throwing himself into the Mersey River. For this, he was dishonourably discharged.     Con...

Professor Frances Corner OBE, is Warden of Goldsmiths,  University of London. She  has been the Head of London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London, since 2005. In 2009 she was made Professor of Art and Design Education. She chaired the Council for Higher Education in Art & Design (CHEAD) and was a committee member for GLAD (Group for Learning in Art and Design). Whilst at LCF she has implemented and supervised a number of pioneering areas, including: Art Against Knives; the Send Prison Project; the Ten Stores Challenge. Her research interests are, amongst other areas: Sustainability; fashion consumption; Health and Well-Being; and Arts & Design Education. LCF is the UK’s only college to specialise in fashion education and research. It is the world’s oldest fashion educational institution.  You began your career studying Fine Art, and you have exhibited as a fine artist. What form does your fine art take?  I was essentially a drawer and print...

     Born in 1947, Wayne Rogers never thought of himself as a boy, and wore girls’ clothes whenever he could. By his late teens he had chosen the name Wayne County and under this name he performed in several rock and proto-punk bands. Aged 21, in 1968, he fled his hometown of Georgia, Alabama and moved to New York. Life for queer and transgender people in America in the mid-to-late 1960s was often a harrowing ordeal. As she once explained in an interview, “In Atlanta there was a law that if a male’s hair touched the tip of his ears, he could be arrested and thrown in jail!” Any man who wore clothing that could be deemed ‘feminine’ could be arrested. Horrors awaited any man who was dragged down to the police station for transgressing the dress code. Men with long hair faced having it forcibly shaved off. People were beaten, or even raped, while all the cops sat around enjoying the show. Jayne says, “Back in those days, no one used the term ‘trans’. I didn’t even know what ...

  It must here be observed that sailors have been a perennial touchstone for the gay erotic imagination. They have taken the main stage in the works of gay American artists, such as Charles Demuth, and George Platt-Lynes, amongst many others. For gay men, the idea of hundreds of young men, in peak physical condition, crowded together on a ship for months with no female company available, is a loaded and very appealing one. Add to that the historically-held view that sailors are not as particular as their landlubber counterparts as to where they find sexual ease and the legend is complete.                       Charles Demuth, Sailors Urinating , 1930       George Platt-Lynes, Sailors , 1935 Sailors were also popular subject matter for Paul Cadmus, and he made a number of sprawling, kitsch paintings on the theme. Invariably , Cadmus’ salty sea dogs are drunken, horny lummoxes. Throughout the '30s, '40s and '50s th...

Born in 1890, in the small Welsh coastal town of Tenby, Nina Hamnett at first grew up in relatively comfortable family life. She attended a private boarding school until the age of 12, when she was moved on to the Royal School for Daughters of Officers of the Army, in Somerset, until 1905. But when her father was dishonourably discharged, she was forced to leave the school. Her aunts then took over the expense of her education. At 16, she was accepted at the Pelham Art School, and then gained entrance to the London School of Art, where she remained until 1910.  While studying in London she had a love affair with the sculptor, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who cast a series of nude bronzes of her. She also befriended the poet Ezra Pound.  In 1914, aged 24, she travelled to Paris to study at Marie Vassilieff's Academy. On her first night in the city she gravitated to Montparnasse, Paris' bohemian  quarter. She went to the cafe La Rotonde, where Amedeo Modigliani introduced hi...