Allegations claiming that Lear was a drag queen or intersex were circulating from the beginning of her modelling and singing careers.[29][30] Her alleged transgender background has been commented by Salvador Dalí himself,[31] and upon in the media and in the biographies of those who knew Lear earlier in her life, including Dalí,[32][33] with Dali's biographer Ian Gibson's devoting an entire chapter to her.[21]
April Ashley, a transgender entertainer and model, has claimed that in the 1950s and early 1960s, Lear, whose birth name she stated was "Alain Tap,"[34] and she were working together in the Parisian transvestite revues Madame Arthur and Le Carrousel. In her book April Ashley's Odyssey, Ashley recalls Lear performing drag acts under the stage name "Peki d'Oslo".[35] Similar facts have been reported by Romy Haag, a transgender artist living in Germany, who ran the popular nightclub Chez Romy in Berlin and knew Amanda,[36] and Bibiana Fernández, a Spanish transgender actress and singer.[37]
Some sources insinuate that Dalí sponsored Lear's sex reassignment surgery in Casablanca in 1963, carried out by Doctor Georges Burou,[38] and also that Dalí invented the stage name for her, a pun of the Catalan language "L'Amant de Dalí" (Dalí's lover).
In 1978, she posed nude for Playboy.[39]
Despite Lear contradicting transgender rumours on numerous occasions and explaining they were part of a strategy to draw public attention,[40] the rumours continued to persist. She had denied them from the beginning of her singing career, in 1976, stating that it was "a crazy idea from some journalist"[28] and later claiming that it was Salvador Dalí or even herself who'd started the rumour.[41][42] She addressed the allegations in an ironic and provocative way in her songs "Fabulous (Lover, Love Me)" and "I'm a Mistery" (deliberately misspelled as to reference the word "mister"). Despite some sources claiming her transgender background is an open secret, she has always flatly denied it, even when confronted by Ian Gibson during a TV show.[43]
However, French,[44][29] British[45][46][47] and Italian[48][49] newspapers and magazines in the 1960s and 1970s and more recently in 2008,[50] with an excerpt surfaced online in 2011[51] and in 2016 in an article in La Stampa,[34] included passport details and a reproduction of a copy of Lear's birth certificate, which states that she was born Alain Maurice Louis René Tap on 18 June 1939 in Saigon, and a picture of Lear before her supposed transition.
Lear allegedly grew up in the South of France and in Switzerland, or between London and Paris,[19] or in Nice.[52][53] Raised speaking French and English, she learned German, Spanish and Italian in her teens, and would use multilingualism in her professional life.
The Guardian, on 24 December 2000, summarized the information relating to this aspect of Lear's life as follows:[17]
Lear's background remains a mystery. She has variously let it be known that her mother was English or French or Vietnamese or Chinese, and that her father was English, Russian, French or Indonesian. She may have been born in Hanoi in 1939, or Hong Kong in either 1941 or 1946. Once she said she was from Transylvania. And to this day, it is a matter of conjecture as to whether she was born a boy or a girl.
