ABSTRACT
“If money wasn’t important in the world today to survive, I guess I wouldn’t want anything but what I have now,” Octavia St. Laurent muses as she readies herself for a photo shoot. “But since money does, I hope that the way I look puts money in my pocket.” A model-perfect beauty with smooth cocoa complexion, beckoning green eyes, a pouty but playful mouth, a mane of hair that bobs thickly just above her shoulders, and firmly muscled legs and tightened torso that do serious justice to a two-piece bathing suit, Octavia St. Laurent has reason to be confident about the value of her appearance. But her ambitions can only be realized once her self is completed; as she confides to filmmaker Jenny Livingston in the documentary Paris Is Burning (1990), Octavia St. Laurent hopes “to become a full-fledged woman of the United States” by having a sex change operation in the near future.
