Sir Lady Java, a pioneering transgender performer and activist who boldly challenged discriminatory laws and police harassment as a star of the Los Angeles nightclub scene in the 1960s, died Saturday following a stroke, close friends confirmed Tuesday. She was 82.
“It’s a big loss for the community,” said actor Hailie Sahar, who is preparing to play Java in a biopic and was one of her primary caregivers over the last two years. “She started an LGBTQ+ movement before there was really an LGBTQ+ community to rally behind her.”
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.
Java was a hat-maker and designer, skills she incorporated into her own ensembles. She got her start waiting tables at the Redd Foxx Club on La Cienega Boulevard in West Hollywood, but was noticed for her beauty and invited on stage, where she was a natural. Soon she was performing regularly, and alongside big names such as Richard Pryor, friends said.
“Her comedic beats were on point,” said Sahar, also a transgender woman of color known for her performance as Lulu Abundance in the award-winning FX series “Pose.”
In 1967, Java joined the American Civil Liberties Union in a lawsuit challenging her arrest by Los Angeles police for performing in drag without a permit, a violation of what was then known as Rule No. 9, a local cross-dressing ordinance. She ultimately lost her case in the California Supreme Court, but the ordinance was repealed two years later.
Java’s stand predated by two years the uprising over similar anti-LGBTQ+ police harassment at the Stonewall Inn in New York, and has never received the same attention. However, it has gained a larger share of the spotlight in recent years as historians and younger queer people have sought to bring more attention to previously overlooked heroes of the queer rights movement — especially transgender people of color such as Java.
“The significant thing about Java,” Sahar said, “is Java came long before the ballroom was created, long before the Stonewall riots in New York, and so she was really a pioneer.”
Sahar said she first heard Java’s name about 15 years ago, when a man at a rehearsal told her she reminded him of Java. Sahar said she went home and started googling Java and “became extremely enamored with her beauty and what she stood for.”
She set out to find and meet Java, and eventually succeeded. Soon enough, Java became her “trans mother” and a queer role model, a fellow “fair-skinned mixed-race woman” who came up from humble roots to take Hollywood by storm — bigotry and discriminatory laws be damned.
She also became a dear friend, Sahar said. “She was the most hilarious person you would ever meet. She was so quick-witted, so intellectual, so classy — but don’t try her because she will let you know exactly how she felt,” Sahar said with a laugh.
Jayce Baron, another one of Java’s caretakers in her final years, said queer people today are “benefiting as a community on the backs and shoulders of trans people of color, and are hardly ever giving them their credit or their just due.”
That should change, he said, because understanding that history will be crucial for continuing the fight for queer rights into the future.
“If Java was able to do the work that she did in the 1960s, we can continue that work today,” he said. “Her legacy is not over.”
In fact, Java’s legacy is particularly relevant today, queer activists said, as LGBTQ+ rights come under attack — bolstered by President-elect Donald Trump’s victory on a campaign centered in part on an anti-transgender agenda.
Trevor Ladner, director of education programs at the One Institute, an LGBTQ+ history and education organization in L.A., said he teaches Java’s story as part of the institute’s youth program, and learned of her death while researching her story with students over the weekend.
He said California law requires that school-age students receive education on the contributions of queer people and people of color, and Java’s “trailblazing fight for her labor rights” in the 1960s fits the requirement perfectly.
“The importance of her story is underscored by ongoing legislative attacks on trans autonomy and drag entertainment,” Ladner said, “and the increasing visibility of trans youth in schools.”
Sahar said Java was “baffled” by the upsurge in anti-transgender sentiment in recent years, because “she came from an era where they helped to build the groundwork” to turn the tide toward acceptance and never thought the country would turn back.
But she also felt good about the biopic of her life, for which Sahar is working to find backing alongside producer Anthony Hemingway.
“She felt that people seeing her life story and understanding what it took to get here, to this point, they would have a better grasp on love and acceptance and equality,” Sahar said. It was something the two agreed on.
“Java told me, ‘Baby, I did my work back in the day. I fought for our rights. You have to figure out what you’re going to do,’” Sahar said. “And I said, ‘Java, that’s why we’re doing your film.”
In her own interview about the biopic before her death, Java said she felt her story was “necessary to tell” — especially today.
“Many of my brothers and sisters got killed in my time,” she said, “so I don’t care who doesn’t like it. I’m going to tell it.”
Times staff writer Grace Toohey contributed to this report.