Long before it was safe, or even really possible, to live openly as a trans woman in America, Liz Eden did it
anyway, loudly, unapologetically, and on her own terms. Born Ernest Aron in Brooklyn in 1946, she lost her mother at
fourteen, left home at eighteen, and remade herself in Greenwich Village, taking a new name after Elizabeth Taylor
and finding a chosen family among the drag balls and after-hours clubs of the city's queer underground, in the same
orbit as Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn. Fate handed her a strange kind of fame: her partner John Wojtowicz's
botched 1972 bank robbery, carried out in part to fund her surgery, became the basis for Dog Day Afternoon (1975),
one of the most celebrated films of the decade. Yet Liz herself was reduced to a deadnamed, misunderstood footnote
in it. She refused to stay a footnote. She used the notoriety to pay for her own transition, told her story in her
own words in a 1977 magazine piece, and kept living boldly and openly through the rest of her life, eventually
settling in Rochester. She died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987, at just 41, but not before insisting, in her own
writing, that hers was a story worth telling. This interview, and Anni Arbour's research behind it, are an answer to
that wish.
Anni Arbour writes Trans Ascending, a Substack publication devoted to telling transgender history and contemporary
trans lives with the depth and accuracy they're too rarely given elsewhere. Her subjects have ranged from Lynn
Conway, the pioneering computer engineer who transitioned decades before it was safe to do so publicly, to working
artists, activists, and everyday trans women whose stories don't usually make it into print at all. The Herstory of Liz Eden, published across eight parts in late 2025, is Anni's most ambitious project to date. It is a full-length
reconstruction of a woman who has spent fifty years as a footnote in someone else's story, first as a side character
in a magazine article, then in a Hollywood film, and now, finally, as the subject of her own. Built from archival
research, original manuscripts, and interviews others overlooked, the series recovers Liz Eden's own voice from
underneath five decades of secondhand telling. I am so happy and grateful that Anni agreed to sit down and chat with
me about this work.
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