Man Enough To Be A Woman

★★★★

Jayne County with Rupert Smith

SERPENT’S TAIL. £12.99

Intimate storytelling from trailblazing trans-singer.

Aunt Vivien killed her husband with a shotgun. That’s how things got solved in Dallas, Georgia, wrote Jayne County in her 1995 memoir, brought up to date here with a new epilogue. It’s in Dallas, aged six, that County, born Wayne Rogers, realised she would rather be a girl and now, aged 75, she’s returned to the vicinity, as an artist with 19 cats. In between, she faced discrimination at every turn but never succumbed. She spent the 1960s in New York getting schooled by Andy Warhol’s Factory and was on the frontline at the Stonewall Riots. In the ‘70s she relocated to London and with the Electric Chairs released one of the punk era’s defining singles, Fuck Off. Then on to West Berlin in the ’80s to become a figurehead of the queer underground as a stage actor. Inspiring, absorbing, County emerges as “a possibility model”, someone who fought discrimination and won.