The Herstory of Liz Eden: Part 1
A trans icon finally tells her story
Liz Eden in LIFE magazine (Sept. 22, 1972)
[Special thanks to Lou McCarthy of the LGBT Community Center National History Archive for their invaluable research help.
Unfortunately, due to the time period covered herein, certain terms and viewpoints may be offensive to the reader. Whenever possible, though, I have corrected deadnaming in quotes and citations, and rectified misgendering pronouns. Typos and misspellings have been noted, but left uncorrected.]
Liz Eden was no saint. But who ever said only saints can tell their life stories?
Given that criteria, few celebrities, and no politicians, would ever dare to write an autobiography. So, why shouldn’t she?
Others have told parts of her story and made a lot of money from doing so. The thing is, they never told her story completely, and often, they had it wrong.
Fortunately, Liz did tell her story. Ironically, she did so within a “men’s” magazine that otherwise catered to the masturbationary fantasies of cisgender-hetero men by debasing AFAB women.
The three-page article that ran in the June 1977, issue of CLUB was entitled, “TS,” which the subtitle parenthetically explained, “and it doesn’t mean tough shit, either!” Liz’s writing was raw, unabashed, and lewd. An apt fit for its venue and true to its author. The original typed manuscript still exists, and in places, it has been used to provide information that didn’t make it into the published article.
The man who dragged Liz into the headlines, a man named John Wojtowicz, had his life story and his version of their relationship, recorded repeatedly. Hell, it was made into a movie. But nobody cared to hear what Liz had to say.
It’s time she is heard.
It is an unfortunate truism that transgender people rarely catch the public’s eye until they are involved in something bad.
This was even more the case in the early 1970s. The women’s liberation movement had tapped into the decades-long frustration of American women denied opportunities American men took for granted. And after the cops raided the Stonewall in 1969, gay people found their Alamo and coalesced into a unified rebellion against their oppression.
Transgender people, though, were often excluded. The gay community saw them as interlopers and eyed them with suspicion. Militant lesbian leaders in particular resented the presence of assigned-male-at-birth men in women’s clothing at their rallies, for daring to consider themselves allies fighting for the same cause.
The fact is transgender people were not yet an identity most people grasped. They were conflated with crossdressers, still referred to as transvestites, and if they subjected themselves to gender-affirming surgery, they graduated to transexual status. An even more esoteric designation that only a few individuals had dared to share publicly out of fear and condemnation.
In 1972, Liz lingered in the purgatory reserved for those who suffered body dysphoria but hadn’t yet transitioned. She lived outside the mainstream of society, out of sight of “normal” Americans who only occasionally, tentatively, wandered into the subculture she called home.
It was a world she probably would have stayed in, anonymous and ignored, until the irrational actions of someone else made that impossible.
If you recognize her name at all, chances are it is in relation to the 1975 film, Dog Day Afternoon. The movie is now considered a classic and it features one of Al Pacino’s best-known performances. Surely you remember the scene of a sweaty Pacino pacing back-and-forth, yelling, “Attica! Attica!” as a cordon of police and a phalanx of photographers filled the street in front of a bank he was trying to rob. You may also remember it was based upon true events.
Sort of.
John outside bank (Aug. 22, 1972) and Al Pacino scene from “Dog Day Afternoon” (1975)
The movie was based upon a story that ran in the Sept. 22, 1972, issue of LIFE magazine entitled, “The Boys In The Bank,” written by P. F. Kluge and Thomas Moore. The two writers were assigned the story due to their journalistic experience, and as such, the article they produced was a fairly accurate accounting of the on Aug. 22, 1972, bank robbery committed by John Wojtowicz and Sal Naturale at a Chase Manhattan bank branch on Avenue P in Brooklyn.
“The Boys in the Bank,” LIFE (Sept. 22, 1972) and “The Little Bank Robber and the Big Lie,” GAY (Oct. 16, 1972)
Their story was optioned by producer Marty Elfand and made into a movie by director Sidney Lumet. But while the events surrounding the robbery are substantially factual, the sympathies of the Kluge and Moore lay with the perpetrators. Liz was an afterthought and a manipulative one at that, if their story was accurate.
“Eventually John Wojtowicz formed a relationship with tall, wispy Ernest Aron. Ernest was demanding. He kept asking Wojtowicz to do things for him, buy a bracelet, give him a little spending money. He never did what he was told. ‘Who do you think I am, your slave?’ he’d say. This baffled Wojtowicz, but nevertheless the relationship flourished, and at last culminated in a bizarre drag wedding.”
A reader couldn’t be faulted for presuming that poor John Wojtowicz was taken advantage of by his trans lover, deadnamed in their article, but in fact, Liz Eden.
The writers worked mostly from the viewpoint of Wojtowicz and his family. Their sympathies carried over into the film and set the tone for the many media depictions of Wojtowicz that would follow.
Kluge and Moore’s portrayal of John as a love-struck, misguided Robin Hood played well to LIFE’s readership. Liz was just a side character. A crazy, drugged-up, suicidal transvestite.
Nice and tidy. A tale meant for the movies.
John, aka “Littlejohn Basso,” was well-known in New York City’s gay community. It was a familiarity born of his involvement with the Gay Activists Alliance (GAA), the leading gay rights group that emerged in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall uprising. He was a well-known figure around the refurbished fireqhouse they used for their headquarters. A quirky, controversial figure.
Gay Activists Alliance Firehouse, 99 Wooster St. (1971) [Richard C. Wandel]
Randy Wicker, a legendary figure in the early years of the gay rights movement, was also a writer for GAY magazine when the bank robbery transpired. His account of the events of that day ran in two issues of GAY (Oct. 16th and 30th) and gave a far less flattering depiction of John than that presented by Kluge and Moore.
Wicker admitted that “I only knew Littlejohn casually,” even though he had been the person who videotaped the December 4, 1971, “wedding” of Liz and John. Otherwise, he knew little about the “groom.” But he summed up the prevailing opinion of other GAA members who believed that Wojtowicz was a “crazy, obnoxious, unlikable bisexual.”
John, NEW YORK DAILY NEWS (Dec. 14, 1970)
However, mutual acquaintance John Bidonde, who was close to both Liz and John, had a different perspective.
“Unlike most of the gays who knew Littlejohn, Bionde genuinely liked him.”
“Bionde thought of Littlejohn as a basically kind and good person, someone with a hot temper but who ordinarily wouldn’t harm a fly.”
Liz had never met John before encountering him at an Italian street festival.
“I met John the summer or 1971 at Saint Anthony’s Feast 1n Little Italy. In keeping with gay/drag lifestyle at the time, I was busy cruising all the hot, young Italians with three gay friends when another friend came up behind me.”
“‘Liz, I’ve got someone here who’s dying to meet you,’ he said.”
“‘I hate to break it to you, Jimmy, but I think you’re a little late. Your friend looks like he’s been dead at least a week.’”
“His friend beamed. His friend was John Wojtowicz better known around the Village as ‘Little John,’ a name he earned on more than one account.”
John went by the name of “Littlejohn Basso” when associating with the local gay and trans community. “Basso” was his mother’s maiden name, and he wanted people to know he was part Italian.
“I met [Liz] June [13]th, 1971. It was Saint Anthony’s Feast,” John recalled years later to an interviewer for the documentary, The Dog.
“He was in what we call semi-drag. He had pants on, but he had makeup on. And he was with two gay priests. So, I went over, and he caught my eye because like I told you, I’m one of those, when you first meet somebody, you become infatuated with them, and the first time I saw [Liz], I knew I had to have him.”
John always referred to Liz using male pronouns. It was a hurtful habit that indicates his “love” for Liz was more likely a fetish-born obsession. Nowadays he would be deemed a “chaser.”
Whatever the case, he disregarded her personal identification as a woman. Something he should have known, as Liz made clear when she wrote: “I was born genetically male but for as long as I can remember my mind has always identified female.”
Liz had been designated a boy at her birth in Brooklyn, on Aug. 19, 1946, the child of Ernest Aron, and Ruth, née Harken.
The Arons had married soon after Ernest was discharged from the Navy at the end of WWII. Both parents had been married previously, and Ruth had a daughter living with them named Barbara Sehlmeyer, who was nine years older than Liz.
Problems soon arose in the marriage, which led to a separation. The 1950 federal census indicates that by then, Ruth was raising the two children alone.
In 1952, Ernest took advantage of Florida’s liberal divorce laws by temporarily moving to that state, establishing residency, and divorcing Ruth in absentia. Soon after, he got married once again, to Gertrude Weiss, who had three daughters of her own.
Ruth raised her two children in one half of a small duplex in the Richmond Hill section of Brooklyn. It was a cute little home in nice middle-class neighborhood. Wonder if she and the kids ever knew that the previous occupant had killed herself in the kitchen?
Liz’s childhood home, 104-53 109th St., Brooklyn (2024) and the LEADER-OBSERVER (March 30, 1961)
Liz suffered a minor injury on a playground seesaw in 1961 according to a tiny article in a local paper. Years later in an outline presumably meant for a proposed biography, writer Janel Bladow wrote how young Liz “often slept with and was spoiled by” her mother.
Janel Bladow (1970s) and Trapped: A Story Of A Transexual (1976)
“One Halloween 8 year-old [Liz] dressed as a girl.” An event which led Liz to tell Bladow, “‘This is the first time that I really felt real, like me.’”
Picked on by the other kids at school for being effeminate, Liz had her first sexual experience around the age of 14 with a boy down the street. But another event in that crucial year impacted even more.
Less than two months after Liz’s playground accident, her mother died.
“We were very close,” she told interviewer Gloria Leonard in 1980. “She became ill and was bed-ridden and I helped look after her along with the nurses. She died when I was 14 and I was really hit hard by her death. A few months later, I had a nervous breakdown. I tried to commit suicide. I took an overdose of Sleepeze and Nytol and was hospitalized.”
Liz’s half-sister Barbara had married just the year before, so after her mother died, she and her new husband moved back into Ruth’s home.
When she was in the tenth grade, Liz dropped out of school. She took odd jobs as a mail clerk and a messenger. And at the age of 18, she struck out on her own.
Like many other queer kids from all over the country, Liz drifted into the demimonde of Greenwich Village, New York City’s primary gayborhood.
“[Liz] and a drag queen visited a wig shop in Queens,” Bladow wrote in her outline. “[She] was fitted with a wig, [her] first and went to Dazee Dees Drag Ball. Liz Eden bloomed.”
“Dayzee Dee’s Thanksgiving Ball,” FEMALE MIMICS #2 (Spring 1971)
She stopped using her deadname and rechristened herself “Elizabeth,” after Elizabeth Taylor, and “Eden,” after the Biblical Garden.
Jeremiah Newton, a close friend from this period of Liz’s life, was interviewed in The Dog and said: “I first met Liz Eden in 1966. Liz sort of dressed like a guy but like a girl because in those days, there were strict laws about dressing like women,” said Newton. “She always had a loud, loud, loud mouth. The wallpaper would curl off the walls when she started cursing.”
LIz before gender-affirming surgery (undated)
“Liz was the center of every scene. And she had a lot of energy. She was a great dancer. [She] had a portable record player, and [she] would play records over and over. Judy Garland or Carmen Miranda and all of that. [She] loved that.”
“Liz was the center of every scene. And she had a lot of energy. She was a great dancer. [She] had a portable record player, and [she] would play records over and over. Judy Garland or Carmen Miranda and all of that. [She] loved that.”
Wilfred Academy of Hair and Beauty Culture, 1657 Broadway (c. 1950s)
For a time, Liz attended the Wilfred Academy of Hair and Beauty Culture on Broadway. But late at night, she would hang out at the gay after-hours club, the Tenth of Always at 82 W. 3rd Street. Previously, the building had been occupied by the Cinderella club.
The Cinderella was one of the dead or dying businesses around New York City the Mafia purchased and converted to a nightspot catering to a gay clientele. Specifically, the Tenth of Always was an after-hours club aimed at teens and college-age gay men. This provided the Mob with their choice of young boys to recruit, or coerce, into prostitution. It may well have been where Liz started as a sex worker.
82 W. 3rd St. before Tenth Of Always (c. mid-Sixties) and Warhol with Candy Darling (1969) [Associated Press]
The Velvet Underground’s Lou Reed and John Cale frequented the Tenth. And it’s where Andy Warhol discovered one of his iconic trans “superstars,” Candy Darling.
Liz would come to the club in drag and when it came time to go home, she pulled out a small suitcase she kept behind the bar, headed into the ladies restroom, and changed back into men’s clothing. At the time, New York City still had a law on the books making it a crime for men to wear women’s clothing. She didn’t chance going out into the streets in a dress.
Liz did have that one arrest in May 1967, in Daytona Beach, Florida. It was for vagrancy and disorderly conduct. That was a little too late in the season for Spring Break, so it may have been a prostitution violation. In any case, it was the only arrest on her record.
By the late Sixties, Liz lived in a single-room apartment in the so-called “Boystown,” a seedy, gay rooming house located at 250 W. 10th Street in the Village. It was a run-down apartment building with a communal bathroom and kitchen.
“Boystown,” 250 W. 10th Street (2025)
“Boystown” was only three blocks from the Stonewall Inn on Christopher Street, where Liz claimed to have joined in the uprising the night of the June 28, 1969, police raid that spawned the Gay Liberation movement.
Liz’s CLUB memoir picked up her first meeting John where she had left off.
“I’ve always preferred men—tall men, short men, blond hair, black hair, young men—if you think I’m going to say old men, you’re crazy! There’s no doubt about that preference. I like ‘em young.”
“My attraction to John was not exactly ‘love at first sight.” It was closer to repulsion.” Liz wrote. “He was too short, too old (28—I told you I liked them young!) and too eager. John tagged along with us for a while until I decided to fix him up with my friend, Father David, an ex-man of the cloth. I gave them the keys to my one-room tenement apartment on West 10th Street and wished them well.”
So, as John and Father David went off to her apartment, went to find a random sex partner in “the trucks,” a portion of Greenwich Village filled with warehouses where gay men met up for clandestine encounters. Upon returning to her room, Liz found John still there, alone.
Location of “the Trucks” in the Village meatpacking district (1973)
They engaged in oral sex and finding herself satisfied, Liz agreed to see him again.
“As our relationship grew John began to penetrate even my thick skin. He was sweet, kind and one of the most thoughtful men I’d ever known. Every week he would appear at my door with a dozen red roses. He treated me as no man ever had. There are men who will you anything you ask for; John went them one better. Often I didn’t even have to ask; he knew.”
“The first few months of our life together went well. Even sex was good. John wasn’t exactly hung the way I liked (big!), but we managed. God did we manage! We carried on everywhere—buses, cars, trains, subway platforms, in bars, behind bars—you name it!”
Newton recalled a discussion with Liz in which he gave his opinion of her new suitor.
“I remember at the Gay [Activists Alliance] firehouse at Wooster Street, Liz saying that this Vietnam veteran was in love with [her].”
“I saw this guy, and he was short! I said, ‘He’s tiny next to you. What are you going to do with him? He’s tiny.’”
“‘Oh, but he loves me [she said]!’”
“He was sort of a troll. He loved her. He was a troll that loved her.”
Holly Woodlawn, one of Andy Warhol’s “superstars,” lived down the hall from Liz in “Boystown.” In her autobiography, A LOW LIFE IN HIGH HEELS. Woodlawn had an even unkinder impression of Liz and John’s relationship.
“Miss Eden, a notorious transvestite hooker, lived down the hall. She was continually turning tricks with a guy who would come in to see her from Queens.”
“‘Sonny’s coming! Sonny’s coming,” Woodlawn quoted Liz, using John’s nickname, “Sonny.” “‘and he’s gorgeous!’ she would scream down the hall, and all the girls would flutter about like chickens in a hen house.”
“Eventually, [John] professed his love and said he’d do anything for her. Well, she of course pounced on the opportunity and told him she wanted a pussy. And not the kind with nine lives if you get my drift.”
