Amanda Lear - Délires

Original title: "Délires" (Delusions) by Amanda Lear.

'An eclectic artist, Amanda Lear readily accepts the term jack-of-all-trades, but when asked to define herself in one word, she answers "star". A virtuoso of repartee and self-mockery, she was in turn the muse of Salvador Dalí, David Bowie's lover, disco diva, and queen of boulevard theatre.

Despite a shy and self-conscious childhood, her enthusiasm and curiosity allowed her to shape the funny, elegant and mysterious character that everyone knows. This is a sparkling anthology that brings together reflections and memories, under the sharp pen of a fine observer.'

Amanda Lear (born 1939) is a French singer, television celebrity, actress, and model, known for her professional career as a fashion model in the mid-1960s and being a muse of Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí.

According to Wikipedia, Amanda's transgender background was confirmed by Salvador Dalí himself, and other well-known artists that used to know Lear earlier in her life. For example, April Ashley, a transgender icon and model, claimed that in the 1950s and early 1960s, Lear, whose birth name she stated was "Alain Tap", had worked with her in the Parisian transgender revues Madame Arthur and Le Carrousel. In her book April Ashley's Odyssey, Ashley recalls Lear performing drag acts under the stage name "Peki d'Oslo".

"Similar facts have been reported by Romy Haag, a transgender artist living in Germany, who ran the popular nightclub Chez Romy in Berlin and knew Lear. Some sources claim that Dalí sponsored Lear's sex reassignment surgery in Casablanca in 1963, carried out by Georges Burou, and also that Dalí invented the stage name for her, a pun of the Catalan language "L'Amant de Dalí" ('Dalí's lover'). In 1978, Lear posed nude for Playboy."

"Despite Lear contradicting transgender allegations on numerous occasions and explaining they were part of a strategy to draw public attention, the allegations continued to persist. In 1976, Lear stated that it was "a crazy idea from some journalist", and later claimed that the rumour had been started by Dalí or even herself." However, in the years to follow, many newspapers and magazines provided facts that she was born Alain Maurice Louis René Tap on 18 June 1939 in Saigon, and those articles included a picture of Lear before her supposed transition."

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