Remembering The Lady Chablis as a Black Trans Southern Stylist

Abstract: The author examines memories of The Lady Chablis (1957–2016), a Black trans southern performer who gained mainstream recognition after featuring as a semifictionalized character in the 1994 novel Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and later playing herself in the 1997 film adaptation. Her 1996 autobiography, Hiding My Candy , provides a first-person account of her life and career, functioning as an indispensable cultural document of Black trans southern life in the mid- to late twentieth century. Across each of these representations, one finds evidence of Chablis’s distinctive style, which she used to express her personality and navigate social and economic constraints. Remembering Chablis’s style as a resource for performance and survival creates conditions for thinking in nuanced ways about the Black trans southern past—a domain awaiting its place at the center of scholarship on gender and sexuality in the South.