#duncan fallowell

Pride Month: April Ashley

April Ashley (1935-2021) was a celebrated English model, performer, and LGBTQ+ activist. In her early 20s she became a successful performer at the French drag cabaret Le Carrousel de Paris, where she was a colleague of Coccinelle, who we profiled earlier. Denied gender reassignment surgery in Great Britain, Ashley went to Morocco in 1960 for a difficult but successful surgery by pioneering surgeon Georges Burou, who had performed the same surgery for Coccinelle in 1958.

Returning to Britain, she began to model for British Vogue, but her career was cut short in 1961 after the Sunday People newspaper outed her as a trans woman. In 1963, Ashley married aristocrat Arthur Cameron Corbett, but the marriage soon deteriorated, eventually leading to the landmark 1970 court case Corbett v Corbett which ruled that the marriage could be annulled because Ashley was biologically, and therefore legally, male. This very public divorce set a legal precedent for all transsexuals that remained in effect until 2004 when the Gender Recognition Act was passed to legally allow people in the UK to change gender.

Ashley tried to recoup after this humiliation, but after a heart attack in 1975, she eventually retreated to the U.S., only returning to Britain in 2005 when she could be legally affirmed as a woman because of the Gender Recognition Act. Her life of determination was a source of strength for many in the trans and queer communities, for which she was recognized and honored by being appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2012.

The images shown here are from our copy of April Ashley's Odyssey, co-authored by Ashley and English writer Duncan Fallowell (b. 1948) and published in London by Jonathan Cape in 1982.

View more transgender posts.

DUNCAN FALLOWELL: What is your relationship with press? Do you suffer?

PAUL: Me and everybody else would prefer it if the press had become that thing it set out to be - the protector of people’s liberties. But it has become a bit corrupt. What’s very fatal as well is talking about the media in the media. It’s very cool to praise them. They don’t like you to say anything naughty.

D: It’s quite cool to attack them, too.

P: Okay, so I go on holiday and I’m building sand castles with the kids, and I really hate having to hold my stomach in the whole time in case there’s a photographer behind a bush. It drives me mad.

D: Why not be photographed with the stomach out?

P: Let me tell you, my stomach isn’t that great. My wife loves it - she’d like me to have more of a stomach - something to get hold of - she’s into all that. But I say - come on, don’t do this to me - I want to be slim and lithe - I don’t want my picture all over the world with my stomach hanging out. But there’s always some guy with a long lens. This last time I literally looked behind every bush.

- Interview by Duncan Fallowell in the Chicago Tribune (14 October 1984)

this last bit has me going absolutely insane.. linda you queen (also the article title is too much its all too much)