PARIS (AP) — The second that modified queer historical past occurred on a sweltering summer season day in early Nineteen Fifties Algeria. An effeminate teenage boy named Jean-Pierre Pruvot stood mesmerized as visitors halted and crowds swarmed round a scandalous spectacle unfolding within the conservative Algiers streets.
All had stopped to take a look at Coccinelle, the flamboyant “transvestite” star of Paris’ legendary cabaret, the Carrousel de Paris, who strutted defiantly down the boulevard, impeccably dressed as a girl, sparking awe and outrage and actually stopping visitors.
What Pruvot — who would turn out to be well-known below the feminine stage title “Bambi” — witnessed was greater than mere efficiency. It was an act of resistance from the ashes of the Nazi persecution of the LGBTQ+ group in World Conflict II.
“I didn’t even know that (identity) existed,” Bambi advised The Related Press in a uncommon interview. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to do the same.’”
A long time earlier than transgender turned a family phrase and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” turned a worldwide hit — earlier than visibility introduced rights and recognition — the Carrousel troupe within the late Forties emerged as a glamorous, audacious resistance. Bambi quickly joined Coccinelle, April Ashley, and Capucine to revive queer visibility in Europe for the primary time because the Nazis had violently destroyed Berlin’s thriving queer scene of the Thirties.
The Nazis branded homosexual males with pink triangles, deported and murdered 1000’s, erasing queer tradition in a single day. Only a few years after the conflict, Carrousel performers strode onto the worldwide stage, a glittering frontline in opposition to lingering prejudice.
Remarkably, audiences on the Carrousel knew precisely who these performers had been — ladies who, as Bambi places it, “would bare all.” Elvis Presley, Ava Gardner, Édith Piaf, Maria Callas and Marlene Dietrich all flocked to the cabaret, drawn to the attract of performers labeled “travestis.” The celebs sought out the Carrousel to flirt with postwar Paris’s wild aspect. It was an intoxicating contradiction: cross-dressing was criminalized, but the venue was full of celebrities.
The historical past of queer liberation shifted on this cabaret, one sequin at a time. The distinction was chilling: as Bambi arrived in Paris and located fame dancing bare for movie stars, throughout the English Channel in early Nineteen Fifties Britain the code-breaking genius Alan Turing was chemically castrated for being homosexual, resulting in his suicide.
Evenings spent with legends
In the present day, nearing 90, Marie-Pierre Pruvot — as she has been recognized for many years by some — lives alone in an unassuming condo in northeastern Paris. Her bookshelves spill over with volumes of literature and philosophy. A black feather boa, a lone whisper from her glamorous previous, hangs loosely over a chair.
But Bambi wasn’t simply a part of the present; she was the present — with expressive almond-shaped eyes, pear-shaped face, and wonder indistinguishable from any desired Parisienne. But one key distinction set her aside — a distinction criminalized by French regulation.
The depth of her historical past solely turns into obvious as she factors to putting and glamorous images and recounts evenings spent with legends.
Such was their then-fame that the title of Bambi’s housemate, Coccinelle, turned slang for “trans” in Israel — typically cruelly.
As soon as Dietrich, the starry queer icon, arrived on the tiny Madame Arthur cabaret alongside Jean Marais, the actor and Jean Cocteau’s homosexual lover. “It was packed,” Bambi recalled. “Jean Marais instantly said, ‘Sit (me and Marlene) on stage’ And so they were seated onstage, legs crossed, champagne by their side, watching us perform.”
One other day, Dietrich swept in to a hair salon.
“Marlene always had this distant, untouchable air — except when late for the hairdresser,” Bambi says, smiling. “She rushed in, kissed the hairdresser, settled beneath the dryer, stretched her long legs imperiously onto a stool, and lit a cigarette. Her gaunt pout as she smoked — I’ll never forget it,” she says, her impression exaggerated as she sucked in her cheeks. Maybe Dietrich wasn’t her favourite star.
Then there was Piaf, who, one night, teasingly joked about her protégé, the French singing legend Charles Aznavour, performing close by. “She asked, ‘What time does Aznavour start?’” Bambi recalled. “Somebody stated, ‘Midnight.’ So she joked, ‘Then it’ll be completed by 5 previous midnight.’”
Reassignment surgical procedure
Behind the glamour lay fixed hazard. Dwelling brazenly as a girl was unlawful. “There was a police decree,” Bambi remembers. “It was a criminal offense for a man to dress as a woman. But if you wore pants and flat shoes, you weren’t considered dressed as a woman.”
The injustice was world. Homosexuality remained criminalized for many years: in Britain till 1967, in elements of the U.S. till 2003. Progress got here slowly.
In Nineteen Fifties Paris, although, Bambi purchased hormones casually over-the-counter, “like salt and pepper at the grocery.”
“It was much freer then,” however stakes had been excessive, she stated.
Sisters had been jailed, raped, pushed into intercourse work. One comrade died after botched gender reassignment surgical procedure in Casablanca.
“There was only Casablanca,” she emphasised, with one physician performing the high-risk surgical procedures. Bambi waited cautiously till her finest associates, Coccinelle and April Ashley, had safely undergone procedures from the late 50s earlier than doing the identical herself.
Every night time required extraordinary braveness. Publish-war Paris was scarred, haunted. The Carrousel wasn’t mere leisure — however a fingers’ as much as the previous in heels and eyeliner.
“There was this after-the-war feeling — people wanted to have fun,” Bambi recalled. With no tv, the cabarets had been packed each night time. “You could feel it — people demanded to laugh, to enjoy themselves, to be happy. They wanted to live again … to forget the miseries of the war.”
In 1974, sensing a shift, Bambi quietly stepped away from superstar, unwilling to turn out to be “an aging showgirl.” Swiftly acquiring authorized feminine identification in Algeria, she turned a revered instructor and Sorbonne scholar, hiding her dazzling previous beneath Marcel Proust and cautious anonymity for many years.
‘I never wore a mask’
Given what she’s witnessed, or due to it, she’s remarkably serene about latest controversies round gender. This transgender pioneer feels wokeism has moved too rapidly, fueling a backlash.
She sees U.S. President Donald Trump as a part of “a global reaction against wokeism… families aren’t ready… we need to pause and breathe a little before moving forward again.”
Inclusive pronouns and language “complicate the language,” she insists. Requested about Harry Potter writer J.Ok. Rowling’s anti-trans stance, her response is calmly dismissive: “Her opinion counts no more than a baker’s or a cleaning lady’s.”
Bambi has outlived her Carrousel sisters — April Ashley, Capucine, and Coccinelle. Nonetheless elegant, she stands quietly proud.
When she first stepped onstage, the world lacked the language to explain her. She danced anyway. Now, phrases exist. Rights exist. Actions exist.
And Bambi, nonetheless standing serenely, quietly reaffirms her fact: “I never wore a mask,” she says softly, however firmly. “Except when I was a boy.”
