At first, it was lonely being Sir Lady Java.
She was a drag singer, an actress, an erotic dancer and a stage-patter comedian in mid-1960s Los Angeles before there was much of an open gay, lesbian or transgender community there.
So she flirted with nightclub audiences and sought to beguile them — and it worked.
She became a figure in the Black entertainment world, getting fond coverage from the Black press, appearing in a Blaxploitation movie and performing for or alongside entertainers like Richard Pryor, James Brown and Sammy Davis Jr. At the same time, she could draw a heterogenous audience, including L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology.
Lacking much ready-made language to define her, she invented her own identity as much as she invented her act. The world around her was not exactly welcoming, yet she wound up finding validation in unexpected places: a heartfelt compliment from a Hollywood star she idolized; a legal fight with the Los Angeles police that she lost before winning; and a public profile that seemed to collapse before she came to be considered, in recent years, a significant historical figure, worthy even of a biopic.
Java died on Nov. 16 in Los Angeles, according to the online news outlet Them. Her death was announced on social media by Hailie Sahar, a transgender actress and singer who was planning to play Java in a movie about her life, as Deadline reported in 2020.
Sources disagree about Java’s age, but Ms. Sahar said she was 82. The cause was a stroke, The Los Angeles Times reported.
Java got her start performing at Los Angeles-area clubs like Joe’s Nairobi Lounge and the Mermaid Room. Ads said her act included a “torrid, sexy dance” inside a cage; a solo fashion show; comedic impressions; stories about discrimination and becoming one’s true self; and a striptease, featuring a white lacy gown and a curvaceous figure.
She was considered “America’s loveliest female impersonator,” Sepia, a Black photojournalistic magazine, reported at the time. Java herself used that phrase, but some fans questioned it. “No female impersonator can fool me and I know Sir Lady Java is no man,” one reader wrote to Jet, another Black publication, in 1967. “Come on Jet, you know that’s a woman.”
Java would later say that she did indeed live as a woman. As a public figure in mid-20th century America, she was playful about her gender. One ad for a performance, part of an archival collection dedicated to her at Harvard University, switched between using male and female pronouns and assured the prospective audience that Java “has never shaved.”
Her appeal became her undoing in 1967, when the Los Angeles police appeared during one of her sets at a club owned by the comedian Redd Foxx. The officers were there to enforce an ordinance of the local municipal code, known as Rule No. 9, which banned entertainment in which “any performer impersonates by means of costume or dress a person of the opposite sex.” The police threatened to arrest Mr. Foxx and revoke his club’s license.
Java lost work but gained publicity. She returned to Mr. Foxx’s club in a sleeveless white dress and pumps along with a big sign that read, “Java vs. Right to Work.” The moment was captured in a photo published in Jet showing a crowd holding picket signs and a theatrically shrugging Mr. Foxx.
The American Civil Liberties Union took on her case, challenging Rule No. 9 in California’s Supreme Court. She lost on the grounds that only club owners had the relevant legal standing, then found that no club owner would adopt her cause, according to the A.C.L.U. But her right to perform in Los Angeles clubs was restored in 1969, when the ordinance was overturned in a separate case.
In 1976, Java’s appearance in the Blaxploitation movie “The Human Tornado” testified to her reputation as a club draw. She plays a nightclub performer who brings in so much money that a rival club owner kidnaps her.
In a 2016 interview, Java said there was nothing she was more proud of than her relationship with the actress, singer and civil rights activist Lena Horne. In 1978, Java performed at a birthday party hosted by Ms. Horne. “The highlight of the evening,” Jet reported, came when Ms. Horne, “the world’s most beautiful woman,” met Java.
“I’ve been wanting to meet Lady Java for so long,” Ms. Horne was quoted as saying in Jet. “I think she’s the most beautiful feminine thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
Java usually gave her place of birth as New Orleans, but Them reported that she was born in Evangeline Parish, a more rural area in south-central Louisiana. Ms. Sahar wrote online that Java was born on Aug. 20, 1942.
Her family moved to Riverside, Calif., during her youth. Her mother helped make costumes for her act and supported her as she figured out her gender identity.
After her performing career ended, Java fell out of the public eye for decades. In recent years she began appearing on historical lists of prominent Black transgender people.
In a 2016 interview with the artist and activist Pasqual Bettio, she said that the name Java came from a “nice looking Black fellow” who had called out to her on the sidewalk, “You look like java, baby — deep, dark and delicious.” She described her heritage as “mixed-race French and Indian and Black and Spanish and German.”
Autobiographical ads about Java refer to her receiving transition surgery. “I dress as a female and live as a female,” she told Mr. Bettio. She added that she went out with both men and women, and that, no matter what, “I always conducted myself as a lady.”
In 2022, Java was a marshal for the Los Angeles pride parade.
Susan Stryker, a writer and academic focused on transgender issues who was interviewed by Time magazine in 2021, described Java’s challenge of Rule No. 9 as “an unsung yet really important episode in not just trans liberation, but the broader L.G.B.T. civil rights movement.”
In recent years Java lived in the Mid-City section of Los Angeles. Information about survivors was not immediately available.
“When I first started there were no gay people around,” she told Mr. Bettio. “They were hiding.” Now, she continued, “It’s nice to see so many. I can’t believe it.”
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