April Ashley’s Odyssey

From April Ashley’s Odyssey:

My room was towards the top of the house and underneath it, “making ends meet, darlink”, was Sheherazade, a towering Titian redhead from the North, a lesbian and a harlot. Most of the women prostitutes were blatant men-haters. Yet, no, she was not so much a lesbian as prodigiously kinky. You name it, Sheherazade loved it. However, her predilection was for sado- masochism. With boots, leather and whips, she ran a prosperous business out of her severely furnished bedsitter. Apart from height, Sheherazade’s most conspicuous asset was the bulk of her breasts, strapped up in a brassière like a black- leather hammock to render them more victimising. They were magnificent, even better than Lana Turner’s in They Won’t Forget. On duty she added a pair of black-leather briefs with apertures let into them front and back and decorated with curlicues of metal studs, Prince Charming boots (seven-inch stiletto heels) reaching to her strong upper thighs, and round her wrists and neck coils of chain cut to the correct length by a man in the hardware department of Harrods, himself a suppliant. A true exhibitionist, Sherry often patrolled the streets attired thus, with a trench coat over the top to prevent arrest.

A fascinating, harrowing account of a wretched Liverpudlian childhood, a hairless adolescence among sailors, a feminisation by the big blondes of the Carrousel Club in 1950′s Paris:

Bambi took me along to Dr Four once a week for expensive shots of the female hormone oestrogen. These assist feminisation, but not fundamentally. The most important effect is the promotion of breast development. As the breasts enlarge they redden and become sore. The nipples become particularly touchy. Oestrogen must affect people differently because my breasts never amounted to much whereas Ruby, another of the female impersonators, had overwhelming dugs, pendulous in character. She’d take off her brassière and wail, ‘My God, the floor’s cold!’

On stage at Le Carrousel, 1958, Paris

On stage at Le Carrousel

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