Every single comment I’ve made on here so far seems to be ‘Back in my day...’ middle aged cringe, but here’s a Guardian article from 20 years ago when it was still worth reading (back when Owen Jones was sitting his GCSE’s) :
https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2000/dec/24/focus.news
Lear looks convincingly like other women considered to be porn-beautiful at the time period (see the Dalí Playboy shoot as an example:
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/salvador_dalis_bizarre_but_sexy_photoshoot_for_playboy_1973) and I doubt an early 1960s penile inversion would be up to much considering how awful they still are in 2020 (maybe it was more of a zero depth type thing and they just carried on having sex anally, seeing as the pioneers are all HSTS types, and their modern day equivalents either don’t bother with operations, ie Thai lady boys, or get it, regret it and never really use their neovag, ie, PrincessJoules on youtube? I might look into the ops that happened in Casablanca and Brazil in the 50s and 60s later) but I don’t think Lear ever told the truth in Lear’s life, so it comes down to Amanda Lear’s word against April Ashley’s. April Ashley seems a very bitter human, who likely felt jealous of Lear for many reasons (and getting away with passing as an actual female could well be one of those reasons):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CY2pHMA_cQ - April Ashley explaining that the law is clear he is a man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0rqZ90rTjI - Lear denying her 1970s biography to a German interviewer, Lear speaks English (the interviewer translates for the audience which is a bit odd and seems to be another media thing that used to happen but has fallen out of fashion).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvEkciZA9uA - Lear with another German interviewer (Lear answers in English)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L07AwQDONE0 - This April Ashley clip is 4 years after the Lear one above - April was born a working class Liverpudlian and has clearly perfected the ‘lady of the manor’ role by this point, but doesn’t actually have a manor - after being outed and having a marriage annulled (due to being a man) without financial compensation (and accidentally setting the legal precedent for the determination of sex in the U.K. in the court case Corbett V Corbett) he was too old to go back to the pre marriage life of tgirl bars and modelling and became reliant on the media and his autobiographies for making cash - he ended up making a living FOR being a sex change pioneee, so it makes sense he could detest Lear for making a living DESPITE being a sex change pioneer. Ashley made a big deal of deadnaming Lear in his 82 book, published 10 years after the marriage annulment, when a big reveal like that would undoubtedly help his ailing bank account.
This is Ashley narrating his photo collections for a museum exhibit - he claims that a photo at 8.35 is Amanda Lear -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L07AwQDONE0&t=8.35
Ashley is a strange character and not entirely likeable (I find the fake posh act excruciating) but the two of them were supposedly friends from the late 50s to the mid to late 60s, so I ask myself, what on earth would the self-invented Lady of The Manor and David Bowie’s Disco Queen have in common if they weren’t both early post op TS‘s? So I believe Ashley, and conclude that Lear is a near-perfect, early HSTS).
Images are: Lear from Playboy, screenshots of the Lear interviews posted above (showing Lear next to the female interviewers and Ashley narrating the photo of him and Lear) and an image that was supposedly published in an edition of one of Ashley’s books, said to show a pretransition Lear (deadname Alain Tap, drag name ‘Peki d'Oslo‘.)
A wild and scary looking pre-woke times tran named Zagria has been keeping an online ‘encyclopaedia’ of anyone in the public eye vaguely tran-adjacent for ages, possibly decades. Some of the entries seem to have had their details removed of late, but hyperlinks still exist on other pages. It’s a massive warren of fantastically autistic note-keeping, and is still updated regularly. Someone should probably back it up before the whole thing vanishes, as Zagria is looking pretty elderly! Here is the entry on Lear:
Revised 4 Dec 2009, 31 Jan 2010. Amanda has given out different years (1941, 1945 and even 1948) and places (Hong Kong, Saigon) for her b...
zagria.blogspot.com
Now, what the fuck happened with Lear’s (bigamous?) husband’s death by fire, alongside his 20 year old expensive-cat-breeding ‘friend’, in 2020? Didier Dieufils?
Because I can’t find much about him beyond this awful geocities tribute (well, there is some stuff but it’s all in French and I can’t be arsed with that today).
Screenshot because it made my browser crash:
Edited because I missed a video link and because I’m new and because I just read that Lear’s second husband Alain-Philippe Malagnac was the adopted son of Roger Peyrefitte, a noted defender of pederasty (French NAMBLA, basically). I’m too squicked out to see if he adopted him as a teenager or not. Grim.
