Finocchio’s drag star, transgender pioneer
Aleshia Brevard, a Marilyn Monroe impersonator at Finocchio’s who went on to transgender surgery and a career in television and movies, died July 1 at home in her apartment in the Santa Cruz County town of Scotts Valley. She was 79.
The cause of death was pulmonary fibrosis, said Joyce Nordquist, Ms. Brevard’s landlord and friend of 60 years.
“She had so many fans that related to what her life was about,” Nordquist said. “She was trying simply to live as a woman even to the point of being married to men who never knew her background. I guess they will be surprised when they find out.”
On her website, Ms. Brevard boasted that she had one of the first gender transition surgeries in America, in 1962, in Los Angeles.
“Within a year of that lifechanging surgery I was balancing a showgirl’s headdress at the Dunes Hotel,” she wrote. “But a showgirl wasn’t what I wanted to be.”
What she wanted was to be a Hollywood actress. She appeared in nine feature films, and made 36 television appearances, including in “The Partridge Family,” “The Dean Martin Show,” and the “Red Skelton Show.” She also boasted of having written nine plays, a novel and a memoir.
When she underwent surgery, the term “transgender” did not exist.
She was among the first female impersonators to take hormones and change her sex, said Susan Stryker, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Arizona.
“Aleshia was a true pioneer who never lost her zest for life,” said Stryker, who featured Ms. Brevard her in the
Emmy-winning 2005 documentary “Screaming Queens: The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria.” In the film, Stryker said, Ms. Brevard “described what life was like in the Tenderloin before there was an organized movement for transgender rights. She was not only strong, she was witty and vivacious.”
Alfred Brevard “Buddy” Crenshaw was born Dec. 9, 1937, in Johnson City, Tenn., and grew up on a tobacco and cattle farm in central Tennessee. Summers were spent hauling hay, and any type of showing off was frowned upon by her father. Dreams of stardom were never mentioned, and the only venue for performance were school talent contests.
“I was proud of her as a brother,” said her younger sister, Jeanne Cauble. “She was not the typical teenage boy. The stud image was not her, and I always admired her for that.”
After graduating from high school, she enrolled at Middle Tennessee State University, but she left to chase her dream in Hollywood, said her sister.
She was still Buddy Crenshaw when Nordquist met her while they were training to be instructors at Arthur Murray Dance Studios in Los Angeles.
“I thought of him as a girlfriend,” Nordquist said. “He was quite fun, and we ran around playing what our future was going to be like.”
In 1959 or ’60, Ms. Brevard moved to San Francisco and became Lee Shaw, doing Monroe at Finocchio’s, the famed nightclub on Broadway. Though Ms. Brevard was taller and slimmer than Monroe, she could pull off the body language and the voice in the days before lip synching.
“For me Finocchio’s offered the first sense of true acceptance I had ever known,” she wrote in “The Woman I was Not Born to Be: A Transsexual Journal,” published in 2001. “As Lee Shaw, drag diva, I was notable and nothing was demanded except that I look incredible and have a modicum of talent. As the blond ingenue of the San Francisco nightspot I was almost complete.”
The road to full completion began when she started hormonal treatments with Dr. Harry S. Benjamin in San Francisco. A year or so later, she moved back to Los Angeles to have gender reassignment surgery. Alfred Brevard Crenshaw legally became Aleshia Brevard Crenshaw, which she shortened for her show name.
Cauble remembered watching her sister’s TV appearances, most of which were small. “She’d come on and I’d say ‘There’s Aleshia,’ and then she’d be gone,” Cauble said. Ms. Brevard’s most prominent film role was in “The Love God?” with Don Knotts, in 1969.
“Limousines whisked me from one press party to the next, and at each exciting stop I held court as the honored guest,” she wrote of that experience, on her website. “My only task was to pout, dimple prettily, and be as quotable as possible.”
When the roles dried up, Ms. Brevard returned to Middle Tennessee State University, where she earned a master’s degree in theater arts.
“I even went back to teaching acting at the same university I’d first attended as a boy,” she wrote in her book. While living in Tennessee, she married for the first of four times, including twice to the same man.
“The only word that comes to mind is disaster,” said Cauble, in describing her sister’s marriages.
In the late 1990s, Ms. Brevard came to Scotts Valley at the invitation of her old friend Nordquist. She found work as a substitute high school teacher and also did community theater.
She and Nordquist took long trips together on cruise ships. “She would sleep late, spend the afternoon doing makeup and her outfits and be ready for the evening,” Nordquist said. “She always looked gorgeous. That was very important to her.”
Ms. Brevard is survived by her sister, of Midland, N.C. A private memorial service will be held in Scotts Valley.
“She was a lady and needs to be remembered as one,” Cauble said.
“Within a year of that life-changing surgery I was balancing a showgirl’s headdress at the Dunes Hotel.” Aleshia Brevard, drag star and actress