For a character as fabled as April Ashley, this is the way to frame a documentary about her – through other people’s eyes. For Simon Callow, who always says (and enunciates) it best, his beloved friend – the model, London socialite and restaurateur who was among the first to undergo gender realignment surgery – was “a self-made woman in the most literal sense”. When Ashley came to his house for supper or parties: “It was like meeting a character from a novel … She was queenly. She had exquisite manners and diction. And behind that magnificent exterior there was a scouse fighter.”
For Boy George: “It wasn’t drag. April was a woman.” Grayson Perry, who briefly dated her, remembers walking into a party in 1983 and “there was April Ashley in all her glory … Seductive. Vampy. There was a lot of alcohol involved.” Juno Dawson notes how Ashley passed not just as a woman but “as a woman of the upper classes”. For Peter Tatchell: “The idea that she might be trans never entered anyone’s head.”
