The country girl.

Showbiz veteran and author Aleshia Brevard tells how she blazed her own trail from manhood to womanhood, Tennessee to Hollywood, and back home to her garden

Aleshia Brevard has gone from man to woman and from drag performer to B-movie star, but her most arduous journey has been her lifelong quest for independence.

"Granted, I enjoy all the glamour stuff, but it's a role," she tells The Advocate. "I don't think you can expect to be taken seriously. I didn't know that necessarily when I was in Hollywood, but I knew that I was getting lost. I felt like a victim--in a very real sense a victim."

That's quite a statement coming from someone who's enjoyed perhaps the ultimate validation imaginable for a transsexual, strutting her stuff in such Hollywood movies as The Love God? starring Don Knotts. Brevard's name may not be in lights today, but she signed her share of autographs as one of Knotts's sexy sidekicks in the late 1960s. The statuesque redhead also snagged roles in other films--most notably Paint Your Wagon, though she lost that part through a miscommunication--and appeared on TV with Dean Martin and Mickey Rooney. She even carried a tray at the Los Angeles Playboy Club.

Brevard recounts her adventures in a new autobiography, The Woman I Was Not Born to Be: A Transsexual Journey ($24.95, paperback), just out from Temple University Press. But her story isn't all sequins and champagne--far from it. Like Christine Jorgensen, the famous transsexual who captivated the nation during Brevard's childhood [see sidebar], Brevard says she spent most of her life craving feminine normalcy.

"I was trying to fulfill men's fantasies, so I didn't dare disappoint them," she says. "I felt obligated--God forbid that I let them sense that I'm not quite sure what I should do in a situation. That's too much pressure for anyone." Even before her transition, Brevard says, she was never without a sense of dependency. Her journey from rural Tennessee to San Francisco to Hollywood was guided as much by her devotion to a series of frequently abusive men as by her progressing transformation from Alfred to Aleshia.

That transformation began early. Brevard's description of her early life first echoes, then amplifies, those of other transsexuals. She felt unnatural in boys' garb and was teased for appearing effeminate. Brevard's response to the situation was more drastic than most people's. In her early 20s, with the aid of a guide to neutering cats and pine-scented Lysol to sterilize the sheets, Brevard managed to dispose of her own testicles.

With that kind of gumption to buoy her, it's no wonder Brevard managed to become one of San Francisco's leading drag performers before her final surgery, this time performed by a doctor. It was during a stint teaching high school in Los Angeles that she was "discovered." Her first movie role was in Universal's The Love God? and it also turned out to be her biggest--later parts involved dressing as a female Bigfoot and riding horseback in a mini-skirt. But on her publicity tour for The Love God? Brevard was treated like a star.

"Limousines whisked me from one press party to the next, and at each exciting stop I held court as the honored guest," she writes. "My only task was to pout, dimple prettily, and be as printable as possible. Perhaps a paid publicist is the only man a woman really needs in her life."

Today, as she tends her garden in a retirement community, Brevard considers her glamorous past with a mix of ruefulness and pride. She may not turn heads anymore, but she savors her friendships far more than she ever did her beauty. Her "great joy," she says, is being accepted for who she really is.

"Somewhere around 50, I guess it was, there was one day I went out and noticed that men didn't care anymore," she says. "At first it hurt my feelings, and then I realized what a tremendous release that was. Now I just like being one of the little old ladies out tending their roses."

Find links to Web sites related to Aleshia Brevard and Christine Jorgensen at www.advocate.com

Lehoczky writes regularly for the Chicago Tribune.