Paris – Decades before transgender became a domestic word and the “race of Drag Rupaul” became a Hit World worldwide – Before visibility brought rights and recognition, was Bambi, the Parisian icon that danced for Hollywood.
The moment when the queer history changed on a suffocating summer day in the early 1950s, Algeria. An effeminate teenager named Jean-Pierre Pruvot was hypnotized when the traffic stopped and the crowds swarmed around a scandalous show that develops in the conservative streets of Algiers.
Everyone had stopped to look at Coccinelle, the extravagant “transvestite” star of the legendary cabaret of Paris, the carousel of Paris, which was paid defiantly by the boulevard, impeccably dressed as a woman, disdaining astonishment and indignation and literally stopping traffic.
What Pruvot, who would become famous with the female artistic name “Bambi” and Coccinelle’s best friend, witnessed was more than a mere performance. It was an act of resistance of the Nazi ashes Persecution of the LGBTQ+ community In World War II.
“I didn’t even know that (identity) existed,” Bambi told The Associated Press in a rare interview. “I told myself: ‘I’m going to do the same.'”
The Carousel company in the late 1940s emerged as a glamorous and bold resistance. Bambi soon joined Coccinelle, April Ashley and Capucine in Paris to revive the strange visibility in Europe for the first time since the Nazis had violently destroyed the prosperous strange scene of Berlin of the 1930s.
The Nazis described homosexual men with pink triangles, deported and killed to thousands, erasing queer culture during the night. A few years after the war, Carousel artists went to the global stage, a brilliant first line against persistent damage.
Surprisingly, the public in The Carousel knew exactly who these artists were, women who, as Bambi says, would undress everything. ”
Elvis Presley, Ava Gardner, Édith Piaf, Maria Callas and Marlene Dietrich went to the cabaret, attracted by the charm of artists labeled as “transvestites.” The stars looked for the carousel to flirt with the Wild Side of the postwar period of Paris. It was an intoxicating contradiction: the transvestite was criminalized, but the place was full of celebrities.
The history of queer liberation changed in this cabaret, a sequin at the same time. The contrast was chilling: when Bambi arrived in Paris and found fame dancing naked for film stars, throughout the La Mancha channel in the early 1950s, Great Britain, the geni Alan Turing It was chemically castrated because it was gay, which led to its suicide.
Today, Marie-Pierre Pruvot, as it is also known, lives alone in an unpretentious apartment in the Northeast of Paris. Its shelves are shed with volumes of literature and philosophy. A black feathers boa, a lonely whisper of its glamorous past, hangs freely on a chair.
With almost 90 years, Bambi is the last of a dying generation. She survived all her Carousel sisters: April Ashley, Capucine and Coccinelle.
And although the attention center vanished, the legacy still shines.
At its peak, Bambi was not just part of the show; She was the show, with expressive almond -shaped eyes, pear and beauty -shaped face that cannot be distinguished from any desired Parisena. However, a key difference distinguishes it, a difference criminalized by French law.
The depth of its history only becomes evident while indicating striking and glamorous photographs and tells the past afternoons with legends.
Such was his then reputation that the name of Bambi’s housemate, Coccinelle, became “trans” argot in Israel, often cruelly.
Once Dietrich, the star queer icon, arrived at the small cabaret of Madame Arthur together Jean MaraisThe actor and Jean Cocteau Gay lover. “It was full,” Bambi recalled. “Jean Marais instantly said: ‘Sit (me and Marlene) on stage’, so they were sitting on stage, cross legs, champagne next to us, seeing us act.”
Another day, Dietrich reached a hairdressing.
“Marlene always had this distant and untouchable air, except when it’s late for the hairdresser,” says Bambi, smiling. “He hastened, kissed the hairdresser, settled under the dryer, stretched his long legs imperiously on a stool and turned on a cigarette. His demacrate makes a cat while smoking, I will never forget him,” he says, his impression was exaggerated while sucking his cheeks. Maybe Dietrich was not his favorite star.
Then there was Piaf, who, one night, joked to joke about his protected, the French song legend Charles Aznavouracting nearby. “She asked: ‘What time does Aznavour start?'” Bambi recalled. “Someone said: ‘midnight.’ Then he joked:” Then he will end with the five midnight. “
Behind the glamor lay constant danger. Living openly as a woman was illegal. “There was a police decree,” Bambi recalls. “It was a criminal offense for a man to dress as a woman. But if you wear flat pants and shoes, they did not consider you dressed as a woman.”
Injustice was global. Homosexuality remained criminalized for decades: in Britain until 1967, in parts of the United States until 2003. Progress came slowly.
However, in Paris of the 1950s, Bambi bought hormones casually for free sale, “as salt and pepper in the supermarket.”
“It was much freer then,” but the bets were high, he said.
The sisters were imprisoned, raped, taken to sex work. A comrade died after a failed gender reassignment surgery in Casablanca.
“There was only Casablanca,” he emphasized, with a doctor performing high -risk surgeries. Bambi waited cautiously until his best friends, Coccinelle and April Ashley would have suffered procedures safely from the late 50s before doing the same.
Every night it required extraordinary courage. Paris of the postwar period was scarp, bewitched. The carousel was not a mere entertainment, but a single finger greeting to the past with heels and eye eyeliner.
“There was this feeling after the war, people wanted to have fun,” Bambi recalled. Without television, the cabarets were full every night. “You could feel: people demanded to laugh, enjoy, be happy. They wanted to live again … to forget the miseries of war.”
In 1974, feeling a turn, Bambi silently moved away from the celebrity, was not willing to become “an old showgirl.” By rapidly obtaining the female legal identity in Algeria, she became a respected and scholarly teacher of Sorbonne, hiding her dazzling past Marce Proust and a careful anonymity for decades.
In spite of what has witnessed, or perhaps that is why, it is remarkably skeptical about recent controversies around gender. This transgender pioneer feels that Wakeism has moved too fast, feeding a violent reaction.
She sees the president of the United States, Donald Trump as part of “a global reaction Against Wakism … families are not ready … we need to stop and breathe a little before advancing again. “
Inclusive pronouns and language “complicate language”, insists. He was asked about author’s anti-transs JK Rowling positionHis answer is quietly derogatory: “His opinion has nothing more than that of a bakery or a cleaning woman.”
Bambi is still standing, proud, elegant, without doing, in a life that covers World War II to “Harry Potter”.
When he first put on stage, the world had no words for someone like her. Then she danced anyway. Today, there are words. So do rights. And the movements that helped inspire.
“I never used a mask,” he says gently, but firmly. “Except as a child.”
