My transgender galpal
There’s nothing new about being transgender, says Adam Edwards. In 1974, he had a ball in Singapore with a charming transsexual
My stag night, in 1987, was held in Madame Jojo’s, the now defunct Soho nightclub frequented by drag queens. My best man had arranged the evening as a joke because he knew what few others did – that, in the early Seventies, I had briefly lived with a transvestite/transsexual (the words in those days were interchangeable). Then it had been a liaison that dared not speak its name; nowadays it would be a career move.
I’m not sure when the present fashionable status of transsexuals began – possibly when the Austrian singer Conchita, in a black beard and gold fishtail dress, won the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest.
Five years later, we have transgender models, transgender inmates in all-female prisons, a transgender runner advising the International Olympic Committee and d even a transgender woman, Lucia Lucas, about to sing the baritone title role in Mozart’s Don Giovanni. And yet, despite the high profile of the ‘T’ in the LGBT moniker, nobody, including the Government Equalities Office, has the faintest idea how many people wish to switch – or have switched – gender.
Half a century ago, transvestites were almost unknown in the West (except in pantomime and among Englishmen, such as Richard Branson, who liked to publicly dress up in women’s clothes). In South East Asia, it was a very different story.
In 1974, aged 23, I, like any hippy worth his Indian sandals and tie-dye vest, hitchhiked down the Malay Peninsula and wound up penniless in the former British colony of Singapore, hoping to work my passage to Australia.
In those days, Singapore was a schizophrenic place. Men with long hair – the exact length defined by a ubiquitous poster – were fined, imprisoned and/or refused entry. Led Zeppelin were barred from entering the country. Chewing gum was illegal;
fireworks, gongs at funerals and Playboy magazine were all banned. Meanwhile, the authorities tolerated Bugis Street, a sprawling street market that at night transmogrified into an alfresco café habituated by streetwalking ladyboys.
It was there, while nursing an Anchor beer in the small hours, that Milly, a petite mixed-race girl with a cut-glass broken English accent, asked me to go back with her.
‘No money,’ I said. ‘No problem,’ she said. Milly took me back to her studio flat on the 14th floor of the Sky Building with a magnificent view of the harbour. There she told me she was ‘half and half’, saving up for the full transsexual operation.
She was one of eight children brought up in the slums of the city and semieducated at an English Catholic school, which was where she had picked up her accent. At 16, after a life of taunts and abuse from both classmates and parents, she left to join the whoring Bugis Street trans community under the protection of a triad of Oddjob doppelgängers.
Milly had said I could stay as long as I wished, provided I agreed to be her ‘boyfriend’, more chaperone than Casanova. At night, she would take two hours to metamorphose from gamine asexual to flamboyant Barbie doll.
Afterwards, as I had little else to do, I would sit at a café table with a beer and watch as she offered herself to tourists and sailors on shore leave.
If, as occasionally happened, a prospective customer put his hand under her miniskirt and cried foul, Milly would drive her ring and index finger either side of the antagonist’s nostrils – it was bloody but not permanently damaging. While he was discombobulated, she would grab his wallet. Milly and some of the other working ‘girls’ would then sp spend the bounty the following day in th the swanky C K Tang’s department store o on Orchard Street.
On other occasions, the group would g go to the matinee performances at the L Lido cinema, including an excited visit t to see the sex education film Where do B Babies Come From? Days were spent p picnicking in the city’s Central Park a and cruising the Orchard Road Car P Park – transformed at night into an exotic food market.
The end of this surreal life came suddenly. Mother Lisa, an ageing oriental transsexual with breasts the size i of bowling balls, invited three young Australian sailors plus Milly and me to Sunday lunch at her apartment.
After the feast, Lisa and the sailors adjourned to an adjoining room, where blood-curdling shrieks and sexual yelps followed. That same lunchtime, Milly told me her real boyfriend was returning and he would kill me if he saw me. It was my prompt to skedaddle to the British Embassy. Two hours later, I was on a flight to Sydney (with the bill sent to my father).
A few years after my sudden departure, the authorities cracked down on Bugis Street, mainly owing to the HIV scare and an increasing puritanical mood in the city. Eventually, in the Eighties, at about the same time as I was reminiscing in Madame Jojo’s, the market was demolished and rebuilt as a respectable shopping mall.
As for the transvestites, well, I can only suppose their souls fluttered to the West and they have been reincarnated as transgenders.