“Choose your destiny,” states the tagline of the fascinating new documentary Enigma, which chronicles two converging stories from LGBTQ+ history—two trans icons who chose very different paths in life.
From multi-hyphenate filmmaker Zackary Drucker (whose credits include directing docs like The Stroll and The Lady And The Dale, as well as appearances in Transparent and Disclosure), Enigma recounts and re-contextualizes the lives of a pair of early It Girls: April Ashley and Amanda Lear.
Born in Liverpool, April Ashley joined the Merchant Navy in 1951 as a teen and was given a dishonorable discharge for attempting to take her own life. She then moved to Paris and began performing at the famed drag cabaret Le Carrousel, eventually saving up enough money to pay for gender-affirming surgery in 1960.
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After transitioning, Ashley began a successful modeling career, appearing in British Vogue and even landing a small role in the Bing Crosby & Bob Hope comedy The Road To Hong Kong. Then, in ’61, a friend told her story to the tabloid Sunday People, causing a media scandal and getting her dropped from the movie.
But instead of denying the claim or retreating from the public eye, Ashley stood firm in her truth, becoming one of the first known British people to undergo gender-confirmation surgery and an early advocate for the trans community, later being named a Member of the Order of the British Empire for her work toward transgender equality.
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Her remarkable life story was first shared in the ’82 biography April Ashley’s Odyssey, which she followed up with her own autobiography The First Lady in ’06, a groundbreaking yet controversial publication in which she, among other details, purported affairs with names like Peter O’Toole and Omar Shariff, and outed an alleged former colleague at La Carrousel by the name of Amanda Lear…
The details of French singer-songwriter and media personality Amanda Lear’s early life are decidedly foggier, as she’s claimed origins in Singapore, Switzerland, and Transylvania. But she emerged as a popular model in the mid-’60s, befriending the artist Salvador Dalí and becoming one of his longtime muses.
Highly in-demand during the Swinging London era and beyond, Lear was a magnet for tabloid attention, especially during her affair with David Bowie. He eventually encouraged her to explore a music career, and in the ’70s she began releasing a series of disco records, many of which were hits across Europe.
When the ’80s rolled around, she became a a staple of Italian television, and has, in some way, shape, or form, remained a fixture of global pop culture ever since. But, all along, she’s hounded by rumors around her gender and sexuality—that she was secretly trans, or intersex, or a drag performer—which she routinely denied or obfuscated.
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Of course, many of those rumors stemmed from April Ashley’s books, in which she claimed to have worked with Lear at La Carrousel, where she supposedly performed in drag under the stage name Peki d’Oslo.
In revisiting both women’s dovetailing lives and careers, Drucker’s film also transports us back to La Carrousel in the 1950s, the Parisian nightclub which, against the odds, provided a safe space for trans women to express themselves.
Featuring archival interviews with Ashley (who passed in 2021), illuminating new interviews with Lear, and commentary from other trans performers and historians, Enigma is both a vibrant trip through trans history and. powerful exploration of identity and survival.
After premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, Enigma—taking its name from an early hit of Lear’s—is now headed to HBO on June 24, and will simultaneously be available to stream via Max. Check out its brand-new trailer below:
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