51�Թ�

Lady Java, as she was also known, worked as a drag queen, singer, dancer, comedian and “female impersonator” at a time when cross-dressing was forbidden without a permit, winning over crowds in predominantly straight clubs and running in circles with L.A. luminaries such as Lena Horne.

By contrast, the 1974 James Caan/Alan Arkin buddy cop movie “Freebie and the Bean” became one of her favorite movies, thanks to its thieving female impersonator.

A transgender woman, known then as a female impersonator, she was of her time but also very much ahead of it, a performer whose battles and brash glamour resonate today as drag queens and LGBTQ+ rights are under siege across the nation.

So fully did Mr. Humphries animate Edna that he was at continued pains to point out that he was neither a female impersonator in the conventional sense nor a cross-dresser in any sense.

In an attempt to avoid scrutiny under the standard’s first prong, Tennessee lawmakers do not specify who is a “male or female impersonator” and which performances of the like would be determined as appealing to the “prurient, shameful or morbid interests of minors.”