“Lady Java’s Tignons” from The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (2022)
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Viewing the world through rose-tinted glasses shaped like butterfly wings, edged in rhinestones, and fringed with hanging beads, Sir Lady Java identifies herself to interviewer Pasqual Bettio in 2016: “We’re called transsexuals, basically, because I’m in a trance about my sex.” Born in New Orleans in 1940, Java—who transitioned with family support at a young age—was a mainstay of Los Angeles’s nightclub scene in the 1960s and ’70s. Billed as the “World’s Loveliest Female Impersonator,” she “appeared in shows all over the West Coast with such personalities as Nancy Wilson, Redd Foxx, Lena Horne, Louis Jordan, James Brown, Isaac Hayes, Joe Tex, Ray Charles, B.B. King, and Quincy Jones,” according to the brochure “Who Is Java?”
As she rose to prominence, she became a target for police harassment. In 1967, the LAPD raided the Redd Foxx Club to arrest her for violating Rule No. 9, an ordinance that prohibited trans women from appear- ing in public with less than three articles of male clothing. But when Java—performing in a bikini, bow tie, slim men’s wristwatch, and tiny socks—proved unarrestable, police threatened to revoke the club’s license or to imprison Foxx himself.
Java understood this police harassment as racialized: “We didn’t know of any establishment that was white that they [the LAPD] were stopping [from employing impersonators], but they were definitely targeting me, because I was queen of the Black ones and they feel that they had more trouble out of the Black ones.” Java responded by picketing the Redd Foxx Club (which dropped her act) and hiring the ACLU to mount a lawsuit against the LAPD.
Lady Java’s stage career continued brilliantly through the ’70s and ’80s, garnering positive press from Jet, Ebony, Sepia, and L.A. Advocate. Her career highlight, she tells Bettio, was performing for Lena Horne at a 1978 birthday party that Horne hosted for her “sister Cancerian, Gertrude Gibson,” where Horne enthused to Jet about her interaction with Java: “I had the feeling I was talking to a friend I had known for a long while... I feel sort of... protective [of Java]. I don’t know, because that’s my sign—Cancer—always trying to be somebody’s mama!”
To impress Ms. Horne, Java wore a spangled bikini and towering beaded headpiece whose curving contours—like many of the dramatically draped cloth, carefully sculpted tulle, and angel-wing feather wraps she crowned herself with—recall the tulip-shaped tignons (cloth turbans) made famous by her sister Louisiana Creoles. In an attempt to curb their social and sexual power, in 1786 Louisiana governor Esteban Miró decreed all women of African descent must cover their hair with knotted cloth and refrain from “excessive attention to dress.” But as Carolyn Long notes, “Instead of being considered a badge of dishonor, the tignon became a fashion statement. The bright reds, blues, and yellows of the scarves, and the imaginative wrapping techniques employed by their wearers, are said to have enhanced the beauty of women of color.” When Java turned her three articles of “male” clothing into high-femme sexiness, she followed in the footsteps of these foremothers’ fashion warfare.
Transforming the accessories meant to shame Black women into sexlessness into pure sexiness, Java declares, she chose “to wear beautiful outfits so a woman can be proud of me when she sees me. I don’t dress for men; I dress for women.”
By the 1990s Java was “enjoying a quieter life, retiring and, sadly, undergoing some serious health challenges,” according to Transas City. These challenges include a stroke from which, Java tells Bettio, “I lost a portion of my brain.” During her 2016 interviews with Bettio, her memories and historical records part ways: sometimes in small ways, as when she remembers performing for Horne at the Memory Lane supper club rather than the Pied Piper; sometimes in more significant ways, as when she proudly recalls winning her lawsuit against the LAPD.
“I went to court on it, and I won LAPD. I won the right for Java to work, meaning other impersonators could work also,” she recounts—though in fact her case was thrown out on a technicality. It would be easy to indulge the incoherence of her memories as post-stroke cognitive impairment. But it would also be easy to honor that incoherence as its own kind of freedom dream—an alternative history that translates the sinuous, undocumentable ways that change can happen.
After the publicity of her case, she reports, “They [other female impersonators] say: We’re able to go to work, and we’re all going [to] work the next day, and we’re going to put on the three male articles [of clothing], and they did the same thing I did: socks and the wristwatch and the bowtie if they wore bikinis . . . little bowties, some of them were jeweled.” Isn’t a flock of jeweled bow ties bouncing light off foremothers’ jeweled tignons another kind of win—another something to celebrate? How do we count and commemorate ways rewired and differently wired Black femme senses make a true story truer, more plentiful, more splendored?