One of the first trans women in the US to receive sexual reassignment surgery, and a performer known for small roles in film and television as well as her spot-on Marilyn Monroe impression at North Beach drag club Finocchio's, Aleshia Brevard, has died at age 79 at her home in Scotts Valley in Santa Cruz County. The cause, according to a longtime friend, was pulmonary fibrosis.

Though she never embraced the term "transgender" and spent years successfully passing as a cisgender female — including with several allegedly unsuspecting husbands — Ms. Brevard was nonetheless a pioneer who from an early age lived life exactly as she wanted to, as a glamorous woman and star of the stage.

Born Alfred Brevard “Buddy” Crenshaw in 1937 in Johnson City, Tennessee, Ms. Brevard enrolled in but soon dropped out of Middle Tennessee State University, as her SF Chronicle obituary explains. She headed first to Los Angeles, where she studied to become an instructor at Arthur Murray Dance Studios but within a couple of years she relocated to San Francisco and reinvented herself as drag star Lee Shaw, impersonating Monroe at nightly shows at famed female impersonation nightclub Finocchio's — some photos of her in those days are in our gallery.

"I grew up balancing a Modern Screen Magazine on my bony knee and dreaming of becoming the silver screen’s next bombshell," Brevard wrote on her website, which documents the course of her career from drag star to glamorous bit player in Hollywood. She would receive gender reassignment surgery in 1962, and she got what she thought would be her big break in supporting role in a 1969 Don Knotts vehicle called The Love God?, which turned out to be a flop. She appeared in several movies under the name A'leshia Lee, including 1971's The Female Bunch and 1981's Smokey & the Judge. She would also end up making 36 television appearances on shows like The Partridge Family, The Dean Martin Show, and Rod Sterling's Night Gallery.

Ultimately, though, she would return to Middle Tennessee State University to earn a master's degree in theater arts and become a teacher there, as well as get married four times, twice to the same man.

Her longtime friend and landlord Joyce Nordquist, whom she met in LA when they were both barely 20, would later invite her to come live in Scotts Valley, where she had been since the 1990s. Nordquist described their cruise ship trips together thusly, "She would sleep late, spend the afternoon doing makeup and her outfits and be ready for the evening. She always looked gorgeous. That was very important to her."

Nordquist also suggests to the Chronicle that many of the men Brevard was with over the years never knew Brevard was trans. "She was trying simply to live as a woman even to the point of being married to men who never knew her background. I guess they will be surprised when they find out."

It wouldn't be until she published her first of two memoirs in 2001, The Woman I Was Not Born to Be: A Transsexual Journal, that she would embrace her trans identity and tell her full story. A second book that picked up her life in 1982 was published in 2010 and titled The Woman I was Born To Be, and in it she also tells the story of two of her early "sisters" in transition, Charlotte McLeod and Kathy Taylor, with McLeod only the second trans woman to get gender reassignment surgery in the world after Danish woman Christine Jorgensen.

"For me Finocchio’s offered the first sense of true acceptance I had ever known," she wrote. "As Lee Shaw, drag diva, I was notable and nothing was demanded except that I look incredible and have a modicum of talent. As the blond ingenue of the San Francisco nightspot I was almost complete."

She continued to assert her desire to assimilate well into her 70s. In a 2013 interview quoted on her Wikipedia page, Brevard said, "Professionally, both as a film/stage actress and, later, as a university professor of theatre, my life was lived outside the [trans]gender community." She added, "For me, as well as for my early sisters, the goal was never to live with a 'T' before our names. Our objective was to blend so thoroughly that the things mixed could not be recognized. It was a choice, made not because we felt any shame about our transsexual history, but because our goal had always been to live fully as the women we’d been born to be."

In the video interview below, published to YouTube in 2015, Brevard talks about her childhood in Tennessee and learning sexual lessons at too early an age after her dad sent her off to play with some older boys.