Would you like to see my mouse tattoo?” purrs America’s number one transsexual and owner of
a fully functional vagina, placing her hand on my knee. I look tentatively across her silicone-augmented body, but none can be seen.

“Oh my,” giggles the outrageous club diva in shock, fingers covering her mouth. “My pussy must have eaten it!” Bizarre is at the Atomic club night in Hollywood. Where Amanda Lepore, New York ‘it’ girl, is launching her career in pop music.

Body glitter is sparkling in a kaleidoscopic lightshow as baby dolls squeal with delight to the campy sound of 1980s electric lolli-pop. Fag hags flash their digital cameras as she struts into the room, energetically bounding around the stage, pumping the air like she’s performing at a stadium rock gig. Amanda unpeels her leopardprint outfit to flash a breast at the audience and starts to sing, belting out electro disco numbers…

Amanda Lepore resembles a surreal, early-1950s pin-up painting, a sculpted Jayne Mansfield with tumbling peroxide-blonde hair and matinee-idol eye make-up. But although she is a cosmetic caricature of womanhood, a surgically diced, sliced and re-arranged experiment, there is no denying her femininity. The nip-tuckers and collagen-implanters should be smug; the work is really astounding. Amanda looks like a girl. She’s a living, singing and fucking Barbie doll – even perhaps a breathing piece of pop art. Andy Warhol would have adored her.

“I just did what I thought was pretty,” she explains, when I quiz Amanda on her extreme quest for beauty. “But I’m surprised that sometimes people don’t know I was a man. Guys will ask if I’m on the Pill. I wonder if it’s because in the back of their minds they wanna believe they’re really with a woman. Maybe it’s a trick, maybe it’s that they just want to cum inside me.”

Since the early 90s, the disco diva’s distinctive transgender-model looks have appeared in books, television commercials and international photo shoots. It’s an image most famously captured by auteur photographer David LaChapelle, who has pictured her squashed by a giant cheeseburger and snorting diamonds.

“He’s so creative and has some wild ideas,” she exclaims. “He first saw me at a club and
knew he had to photograph me. He thought I looked like the imaginary women he used to draw, doodles with big breasts, cheekbones, lips and everything.”

Lepore is a constant fixture in the clubs of New York – dancing, performing and being seen, often nude – and in public, at clubs and art galleries. She famously entertains clubbers totally naked, performing magic shows and making animals out of balloons. One would think that in draconian America this might cause
a problem with the authorities.

“I think I look so perfect,” she pouts. “My skin, the make-up, the hair, the shoes – maybe they don’t think it’s real? It’s not so offensive. It’s like you don’t look so vulgar. It doesn’t look like some truck whore who’s prostituting or something. It has a different motive.”

The transsexual star did cause a frenzy after she was sacked as a go-go-dancer at a West Side
club. Along with fellow man-to-woman Sophia Lamar, Amanda was replaced with a genetic female, causing hundreds of transsexuals and their supporters to demonstrate against “transphobia” at the resulting court case.

With her cartoon image and chic New Yorker style as a promotional tool, Amanda is perhaps the world’s first transsexual to create a merchandising bonanza; she has released perfumes called ‘Happy Hooker’ and ‘Lemore’, and curiously has the fastest-selling limited-edition Swatch watch, which comes covered in her image. It’s a wonder that it’s taken so long for anyone to think of marketing a plastic doll in her likeness; but fellow clubbers and hot designer team Heatherette are soon to release an entire line.

Before the operations, New Jersey-born Amanda was known as Armand, a waif of a boy bearing a strange resemblance to Mia Farrow. The gender-challenged youth undertook his first cosmetic procedure
aged just 15 (a nose job), before completing the full transition to womanhood during her last year in high school. The result was a butterfly-like metamorphosis into a fully functional, disco diva transsexual.

“Oh, it definitely works,” she pouts when asked about her new genitals. “I like sex a lot. My clit’s really sensitive and I orgasm easily. I was surprised because a guy in Germany was just fingering kind of on the outside and I came. I thought you only came through penetration. He had magic fingers.”

During the delicate sex-change operation, the tip of the penis is cut and used to form a clitoris. The shaft of the member becomes the lining of the vagina, with the nerves remaining intact. Amanda now claims to have “pretty much finished” with surgery, using the knife just to “kind of tweak things and for maintenance”. Her most recent operation, though, was a breast enlargement, plus she had her bottom rib broken and pushed in to make her waist appear smaller.

While this may sound extreme to some, Amanda could never compete with her friend Jocelyn Wildenstein, who, while attempting to emulate the facial characteristics of a cat, perhaps went more than a couple of surgical procedures too far.

“Jocelyn’s like an outsider, who’s just not interested in, or happy with, the way they look. It’s bizarre to a lot of people but if she wants to look like that, then why not? I really do think it’s a personal thing. With someone like Michael Jackson it’s kind of like a sculpture. If you keep on working on something till you get it where you want, you can sometimes mess it up by tweaking it.”

Amanda plays with the archetypes of her dumb-blonde persona. How much of this is self-conscious is difficult to ascertain, but Amanda Lepore seems prepared to undergo any extreme method to remain absolutely fabulous. The titles of her upcoming singles – ‘My Hair’ and ‘Champagne’ – gloriously emulate the kind of image Marilyn Monroe nurtured to such success, with a similar sense of irony. The reason her favourite colour is red, for example? It matches her fingernails, of course.