Dating & Relationship status

She performed at Club One on its opening night in 1988, and was a regular performer there until August 6, 2016, just before she was hospitalized.

The Lady Chablis died on September 8, 2016, from Pneumocystis pneumonia, aged 59, at Savannah’s Candler Hospital.

The Lady Chablis was featured in the closing segment of the Savannah episode of Bizarre Foods America on The Travel Channel. She joined host Andrew Zimmern at several Savannah restaurants including Elizabeth on 37th. In 2012, she was interviewed in Savannah on the local television and internet talk show MAMA Knows Best (season 2, episode 1). On April 19, 2013 Chablis performed for the grand opening of the short-lived Mama’s Cabaret in Lewiston, Maine, with “MAMA” Savannah Georgia.

Chablis’ autolife story Hiding My Candy: The Autolife story of the Grand Empress of Savannah was published in 1996, a year before she played herself in the Clint Eastwood-directed movie adaptation of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, starring Kevin Spacey and John Cusack.

She was a prominent character in John Berendt’s best-selling 1994 book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, during her days working at The Pickup on Congress Street. She left her job in a dispute over pay.

In the early 1990s, she moved with her partner, Jesse, to Columbia, South Carolina, where she began working at a new spot, The Menage. The Menage closed after three years, due to new competition, and Chablis did not find much work for a couple of years.

In the late 1980s, a job offer from The Friends Lounge, a cabaret bar in Savannah, Georgia, resulted in her moving south from Atlanta.

She began working at the Prince George Inn, a gay-owned restaurant, where she began a romance with one of her co-workers. She left in 1975 after the relationship ended, and picked up work at Eckerd’s Drugstore. After becoming sick for three weeks, she had to leave that position too. A new friend, Linda, saw the decline in Chablis’ health and moved her into her two-bedroom apartment. She found another job, this time at a Burlington Coat Factory outlet.

Chablis began her career at fifteen years of age.in the Fox Trot gay bar in Tallahassee. It was there that she met Cliff Taylor, who performed under the pseudonym of Miss Tina Devore. He was the first male in Quincy that Chablis ever met who dressed up. Taylor offered to have Chablis stay with him if she ever moved to Atlanta. She moved there in 1974 at seventeen years of age. previously living with her aunt in Tallahassee for about eighteen months.

The Lady Chablis (March 11, 1957 – September 8, 2016), also known as The Grand Empress and The Doll, was an American actress, author, and transgender club performer. Through exposure in the bestselling nonfiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and its 1997 film adaptation, she became one of the first trans performers to be introduced to a wide audience.

Born Benjamin Edward Knox on March 11, 1957, Knox grew up in Quincy, Florida. Her parents Separation from spoused when she was five, and she was supported by her aunt, Katie Bell, and grandmother, Anna Mae Ponder, after her mother moved to Chicago to be a nurse. She did not meet her mother until she was nine, or her father until she was 12. She went on to live with her father in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, in 1969. She changed her name to “The Lady Chablis” when she was sixteen years of age.and living in Atlanta. “My mom was going to have a baby and she miscarried. The baby’s name was going to be La Quinta Chablis and she told me to take the name. I didn’t even know what Chablis was.”