By Ginger Collins

The date was December 6, 1941, a busy night at Finocchio’s, San Francisco’s premier transvestite club, and I had just caught their Saturday, 10:00 p.m. revue. As was usually the case, the showgirls were mingling among the crowd, corks were popping, dignity was dropping, gaiety was in the air, servicemen, mostly sailors, were mildly raucous, and male-to-male pickups in the audience were in full swing, albeit with good taste and well defined house decorum. And for the record, Joe and Marjorie Finocchio, the owners, had high standards. To perform there, you just couldn’t be a “bearded lady or a guy in a dress. No way! You had to be beautiful, very passable, and quite convincing in your impersonation. Your makeup, gowns, mannerisms, and attitude had to pass a nightly muster or your gig came to an abrupt halt. Moreover, you couldn’t enter or leave the club in drag, so backstage dressing rooms were a beehive of activity at openings and closings. This was also long before the days of lip-syncing came into vogue. You sang and entertained in your own voice. These impersonators had to have determination as well as talent. Such Finocchio headliners as Walter Hart (Sophie Tucker) and Lester (Lestre) LaMonte raised the art of female mimicry to new highs. Oh by the way, my name is Ginger and I’m a biological woman and a regular Finocchio’s patron.

Homosexuals or “queers” as they were rudely called back then were not my main dish; however, female impersonators as appetizers were tempting morsels to me. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it was the ever-so-slight Lesbos trait I harbored or perhaps it had to do with the fact that as a woman, I appreciated the time and effort it took to transform these entertainers from ordinary looking guys to gorgeous gals. Thus, the sight of these drag queens mincing about in their heels, squeezed into tight gowns, sporting elaborate hairdos, and talking in falsetto had an unnerving effect on me, especially, when I fantasized about their flaccid, tucked-away penises springing rock hard from their silk, lace-fringed panties, and invading either my salivating mouth or my lubricated vagina.

I liked them all, particularly, Shirley Rogers or Johnny Rogers as he was known in his drab mode. Shirley was at my table and had his hand discreetly slipped up underneath my dress where he was fingering my crotch. Later, when I got him home, I would return the favor. You see, Johnny in addition to being Shirley, a star attraction at Finocchio’s at night, was my daytime chauffer. We each had the best of both fantasy worlds. He was a male who liked to dress as a woman, but screwed like a man, and I was a woman with a predilection for effeminate men who were well hung.

Normally, I stayed until closing, chatting with the “girls” or exchanging beauty tips and risqué jokes, but not tonight. Urgent business was calling and I needed to be on my way. So I feigned monthly female sickness to snickers and winks from Sophie, Lestre, and Shirley and departed amidst multiple hugs and farewells. Marjorie Finocchio came over to bid me adieu. Her husband, Joe, was busy with a beverage problem at the bar.

Since it was only a few blocks away on Montgomery St., I was soon at my destination, the “Copy Cat Cafe,” the highly successful, bohemian nightclub that my husband and I owned along with a silent partner. A private entrance allowed me to enter unseen and I moved swiftly into our office or inner sanctum, as we liked to call it. The man sitting at the center desk was counting money, heaps of it, and was so absorbed in the details that he was unaware of my presence.

I repeatedly tapped a long and exquisitely manicured nail against a thick, oak chair and finally he looked up. When he did, the blasts from my .22 caliber pistol ripped through the quietness of the night like a battleship firing its 14-inch guns. I’m not an authority on naval guns, although my late husband was, namely the son-of-a-bitch I had just killed. I had to laugh: as a former USS Arizona Gunners Mate in the late 1920’s, he would have appreciated the irony. Anyway, I could smell the gunpowder residue from the two shots that I had just triggered. Also, the unmistakable odor from booze and cigarettes lay heavily in the air like a thick San Francisco fog. I wanted to open the windows, but there were none. Instead, I popped some Sen-Sen breath fresheners.

My first shot had missed and was no doubt lodged in the sound-proof-office wall where forensic experts would later find it. So what? My gun was unregistered and I had prepared an unshakable alibi and it was already in motion. My second shot was resting somewhere in his empty skull after penetrating his left eye. With only one good eye, his right, his death mask looked like it was winking at me.

In case his departed spirit on its way to hell was still lingering about, I gave his cadaver the “finger” and kicked his corpse with the heel of my left pump. Then, I dropped my petite weapon into my clutch purse where it joined other essentials, such as lipstick, a powder compact, keys, ID, $1,000 in “Mad Money,” and an emergency Kotex. Immediately, thereafter, I was out the camouflaged exit that only three of us knew existed. Make that two since “Shorty,” my six-foot-five, former spouse, was no longer with us. Now we were down to just Jake and me. And that wouldn’t be for long, only a matter of hours. Poor Jake, he was going to find out how silent a silent partner can be!

It was raining and the streets were wet and I was chilled. Skimpy dresses will do that to you, especially those wherein a lot of cleavage is exposed. The expression, “Cold As a Witches’ Tit,” suddenly made sense to me. By nature, I’m a size 4. By vanity, I squeeze myself into a size 3. That’s not much protection from the elements.

The click-clack of my designer shoes on the pavement sounded like a herd of Clydesdales on display or a pursuit of me by syncopated demons. Thus, I was almost delirious when I reached my stylish, 1940 Lincoln Continental. Time was of the essence. I still had to kill Jake at his home in Sausalito and make it back to my Russian Hill apartment before dawn in order to play the distraught wife when I reported my husband as missing to the SFPD.

Besides, all this drama was making me horny and I wanted to hurry home and take a luxurious bubble bath with Shirley, who would be waiting for me. Typically, we would gently soap each other, sensuously rinse together, dry one another with coarse, linen towels, and liberally powder each other with huge puffs laden with heavenly scents. By then, he would be blue-steel hard and I would be overflowing wet. We would each apply a light dab of our favorite lipsticks and slip into flimsy, diaphanous nightgowns sans panties. The latter would only get in the way. Foreplay would initially dominate. I would lick and he would finger. Both of us would nuzzle and suck. Then, just before a mutual, climatic crescendo was reached, he would stick his “hammer” inside me and nail me to the bed where we would orgasm in unison. The thought of this was delicious and I could hardly wait, but first, I had to attend to Jake in Sausalito! I checked my diamond-encrusted Rolex. It was now a few minutes after midnight on the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941.

EPILOQUE

JAKE didn’t last the night. Within and hour and a half of hitting the floor starter on her Lincoln Continental, Ginger had made it across the Golden Gate Bridge and back and in between had dispatched her former silent partner to eternity with another unregistered .22 caliber weapon. There, he and her bastard of former husband, Shorty, could commiserate on how they had become “Satan’s Angels.” Thank goodness for the thriving illicit gun market in San Francisco’s Chinatown. It certainly beat divorce and partnership litigation proceedings.

SHIRLEY continued to be a headliner at Finocchio’s and with Ginger for the next eleven months until in order to avoid being drafted into the Army, he enlisted in the Navy in November 1942. Subsequently, he went to Boot Camp at San Diego, later trained as a Yeoman, and became a Chaplain’s Assistant at nearby Naval Air Station North Island. Shirley and Ginger stayed in touch, but their relationship was never the same. His dormant homosexuality surfaced among all those “glorious” sailors as he enthusiastically described them to her in a letter, and Ginger was soon a sister-like acquaintance rather than a passionate lover.

He served his Country and his Navy well, however. As fate would have it, his Chaplain boss, a Navy Commander, received orders to the USS Indianapolis, a premier Cruiser in the Pacific Fleet, and he dragged a reluctant Shirley with him. Unfortunately, on July 26, 1945, a Japanese submarine sank the Indianapolis in the Philippine Sea. Shirley made it safely over the side and into one of the few rafts. Later, he heroically gave up his space to a severely injured shipmate (a lover?) floating nearby and traded places with him in the shark-infested waters. Shortly, thereafter, he disappeared and was posthumously awarded the Silver Star.

FINOCCHIO’S boomed during the war years and well into the tail end of the 20th Century. A San Francisco landmark, its program proudly proclaimed, “The most interesting women are not women at all. They are Finocchio’s accomplished female impersonators.” And they were, especially, Shirley. Sadly, time took its toll and cabaret productions and the sight of men in dresses, particularly, in San Francisco were no longer a novelty or an exotic experience. Transvestites or cross dressers were out of the closet and on the streets and in the workplace. People no longer paid money to see them, and on November 27, 1999, Eve Finocchio, Joe’s widow, closed its doors for the final time.

GINGER prospered with Shorty, her husband, and Jake, their mutual silent partner, out of the way. The former was physically abusive to her and the latter was skimming profits from her. (Interestingly, neither murder was ever solved or connected.) She did miss Shirley and his magical eight-inches, though, and never found a suitable replacement among the Finocchio crowd. Ever creative, she decided that if she couldn’t find an effeminate man to meet her sexual needs, she’d find a masculine woman, and she did.

When US Navy Wave (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) Aerographer’s Mate 3rd Class Jill Jensen, stationed at Naval Air Station Moffett Field, 35 miles south of San Francisco, walked into Ginger’s life in early 1943, she never walked out. In fact, she moved in with Ginger for the rest of her life upon her discharge from the Waves in December of 1945. A tall, muscular, athletic woman with boyish-cut, blond hair, who disdained makeup, didn’t shave her legs, and wore men’s underwear, Jill lighted up Ginger’s landscape like a million-watt flare. Moreover, Jill had an enlarged clitoris that when aroused was like a mini penis, not quite enough to penetrate, but more than enough to tantalize. Besides, that’s why dildos and vibrators were invented, both of which they explored and experimented with endlessly.

For the record, Ginger and Jill were at the forefront of mass marketing women’s sexual toys from which they made a sizeable fortune, and retired comfortably in the late 1960’s. Icons among the San Francisco lesbian community, they were charter members of “Dykes on Bikes” and things should have ended on a blissful note. Unfortunately, they didn’t. Jill was viciously beaten to death on a deserted San Francisco street near their home on lower Telegraph Hill in what appeared to have been an unsolved hate crime in 1979. She was 58 years old. Ginger died one year later at age 59 from nothing more than a broken heart since there was no logical medical reason for her early expiration.

The commingled cremated ashes of Ginger and Jill were spread at Ginger’s request on the grounds of the “Portals of the Past,” a monument to the 1906 earthquake located in Golden Gate Park. In a sense, the morality books were balanced, now: Shorty and Jake on one side of the ledger; Jill and Ginger on the opposite. As we know, love may be a “many splendored thing,” but it’s highly complicated, ephemeral, and in some cases deadly.

Finis