Tuesday, January 17, 2012
A transgender icon(oclast): Jayne County, a love letter to the past (and present)
POSTED BY Simon Thibault AT 6:01 AM Leave a Comment | Comments (1)
http://www.xtra.ca/blog/halifax/post/2012/01/17/A-transgender-icon%28oclast%29-Jayne-County-a-love-letter-to-the-past-%28and-present%29.aspx"You have to read this," he said.
My friend Mike was showing me his copy of Man Enough To Be a Woman, the autobiography of Jayne County. We had been talking about County and her in-your-face performances, things both of us were too young to have experienced during County's heyday at Max's Kansas City.
Jayne and Divine
I first read about County when I was a teenager. I was fascinated by the culture that existed in New York City during the late '70s, when the art world mixed with punk, and punk mixed with disco and dub, and everybody lived in cold-water flats. It was all romanticized in my adolescent mind. Max's Kansas City was where that seismic shift in culture was happening, and Jayne County was one of the biggest shakers of the bunch.
