Two other inmates, both with long dark hair and wearing form-fitting minidresses, jostle to be the next to parade down the aisle. Her infectious energy lights up the locked, windowless room filled with roughly 140 inmates.
Laughing onlookers chant, “Work it, Yah Yah!” “Perform honey!” “Better work that runway!”Ĭatwalking on the balls of her feet as another inmate improvises syncopated beats by banging on a metal bed frame using a plastic spoon and a plastic 7-Up bottle, Yah Yah is in her element. She’s flaunting a white cotton halter-top baby-doll dress and matching white Cinderella gloves, hand-crafted for her by one of the trans women inside this infamously tough downtown L.A. Williams, a transgender inmate known on the inside as Yah Yah, glides past a hooting and hollering crowd of her fellow gay and transgender inmates, perched atop their beds for a prime view.
With rouged lips, long hair and a strut that would give Naomi Campbell pause, Dave Williams, 47, works the 75-foot runway that stretches between crowded rows of green chipped-paint bunk beds at the L.A.
