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Sir Lady Java, drag artist and activist who performed alongside the famous, has died

Sir Lady Java 1970 Promotional photographs

Courtesy Harvard Library via Wikipedia CC BY-SA 4.0

She appeared with celebrities such as Redd Foxx, Sammy Davis Jr., Richard Pryor, and Don Rickles, and challenged a law against drag performances.

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Sir Lady Java, a Black transgender woman and legendary drag performer who appeared with some of the biggest names in show business and challenged an anti-drag law, has died.

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Also known simply as Lady Java, she died last week, according to several social media posts. Dates given for her birth vary from 1940 to 1943.

She moved from New Orleans to Los Angeles as a child, and she became a star of the L.A. nightclub scene in the 1960s. She worked as an exotic dancer, singer, comedian, and drag queen, appearing with big-name entertainers such as Redd Foxx, Sammy Davis Jr., Richard Pryor, and Don Rickles.

Lady Java “represents the blueprint, I think, for showgirls who traveled the country, and in her case, all of North America,” Harry Hanson, author with Devin Antheus of Legends of Drag: Queens of a Certain Age, told The Advocate in 2022. “And she really did have mainstream appeal in a way. We tend to associate that as sort of a recent phenomenon, but Java’s really the original ‘It Girl.’”

She also challenged L.A.’s Rule Number 9, a mid-century city ordinance that banned drag performances without police permission. It succeeded Ordinance 5022, a 19^th-century law against cross-dressing that had been enforced selectively, used against trans and gender-nonconforming people rather than cisgender performers who appeared in drag.

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After a permit was denied for an appearance at Foxx’s nightclub in 1967, she sued with help from the American Civil Liberties Union. While courts refused to hear the suit — under the law, the plaintiff had to be a bar owner — the ordinance was repealed in 1969, “thanks in large part to her stand,” The Hollywood Reporter notes.

“I think the significance of Lady Java’s court case, even though it in and of itself wasn’t successful, laid the groundwork for successful challenges of employment discrimination pertaining to gay and lesbian and transgender people,” historian Susan Stryker told Time in 2021.

It was notable that the law was used against a club owned by a Black man, while many white-owned nightspots escaped enforcement, Treva Ellison, assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at Pomona College, said in the Time article. “She always understood the struggle she was facing as both anti-Black employment issue and also an anti-trans discrimination issue,” Ellison said. “She from the beginning had that intersectional understanding of what was happening.”

Additionally, she lived openly as a woman, while referring to herself as a female impersonator, a term used to describe both trans women and cisgender drag performers in the mid-20^th century.

Besides her nightclub performances, Lady Java appeared in films. She played herself in the 1976 blaxploitation movie The Human Tornado, which starred Rudy Ray Moore as Dolemite, a pimp, nightclub owner, and martial artist. She also appeared in the 2023 documentary Little Richard: I Am Everything and an American Masters episode from the same year, Little Richard: King and Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll, both chronicling the early rock star who an androgynous image but ricocheted between being proudly gay or bisexual and being anti-LGBTQ+. He died of bone cancer in 2020.

Lady Java, however, leaves a legacy of being out and proud. In the 2022 Advocate interview, Hanson and Antheus predicted she will be remembered like pioneering trans activist Marsha P. Johnson, and that was why it was important to celebrate Lady Java while she was living.

She is indeed being remembered fondly. “The moment I met you, my entire world shifted,” Pose star Hailie Sahar, who is scheduled to play Lady Java in a biopic, wrote on Facebook. “You brought light to my darkest corners, hope to places I thought barren, and love I never believed I deserved. You didn’t just enter my life — you transformed it, leaving an imprint on my soul that will last forever.”