LADYBUG. This Tuesday, August 23, Google pays tribute to Coccinelle, pioneer of the LGBTQI + community and leader of a French magazine, born 91 years ago.
She was one of the first public faces of the LGBTQI+ community: Ladybug. Born 91 years ago, on August 23, 1931, Jacqueline Charlotte Dufresnoy, her real name, is honored this Tuesday by Google. With a Doodle, representing this blonde woman in front of a red curtain, a ladybug on her finger, it’s hard to miss the time of this anniversary.
Jacqueline Charlotte Dufresnoy was born a man on August 23, 1931, in Paris. She renames herself Coccinelle, a nod to a red dress with black polka dots that she often wore. In the early 1950s, she began to perform at the Madame Arthur cabarets or at the Carrousel in Paris. Sporting a look inspired by Marilyn Monroeshe is the first French public figure to perform a vaginoplasty.
Coccinelle becomes, in the civil status, Jacqueline Charlotte Dufresnoy in 1959. She then becomes a transgender muse and one of the very first faces of the LGBTQI+ community. In 1961, she married the sports journalist Francis Paul Bonnet, then, in second marriage, the Colombian music-hall dancer Mario Florentin Heÿns. In 1963, Coccinelle performed at the Olympia, then internationally and settled in Berlin.
In 1996, she married the transformist artist Thierry Wilson alias Zize Dupanier, a figure from Michou, in Paris. Jacqueline Charlotte Dufresnoy founded the association Devenir femmes, which helps transgender people. In 2006, Ladybug suffered a stroke, and died of cardiac arrest a few months later, on October 9, 2006, in Marseille.