Long Live Leslie

“It’s not what happens to you, it’s what you do with it.”

By: Caroline Savoie

For 16 years, a chronically unhoused, politically involved, theatrical man who disrupted gender stereotypes in his tutus, tiaras, and feather boas strutted through Downtown Austin as the personification of the city’s beloved weirdness.

Wise, resourceful, kind, maddening – his friends said Cochran was the full embodiment of what life has to offer, the full spectrum of the human experience. Eleven years after his death, the nomad’s motley crew of hand-picked friends remember the impact he had on not only them, but Austin as a whole.

Albert

Albert Leslie Cochran was born in Miami on June 24, 1951, and he was one of five siblings. His sister, Alice Masterson, said teachers couldn’t control him, and a long line of others who tried formed behind them. She said he missed class Mondays and Thursdays, but he’d come in for tests on Friday and ace them.

Cochran confided in a few friends that his mother and father were both physically and emotionally abusive, with allegations of sexual assault coming out in Cochran’s later years.

Adam Callaway, one of Leslie’s friends in Austin, said one of the first stories Cochran told him was about how he killed his brother and carried the guilt with him his whole life.

“He was a twin, but his sibling died in the womb with him,” Callaway said. “Leslie said his mom blamed him for the death of his brother, and that really messed with him. He was convinced he was actually responsible for it.”

He left home at 16 years old, stayed in school, and graduated with an academic scholarship to Florida State University, but he dropped out of college and enlisted in the Navy in 1973. After his stint in the Navy, Cochran started traveling across the country. He took up jobs in Atlanta, Shreveport, Miami, Seattle, and spent several years working at Safeway and skinning road-kills in Colorado as “Trapper Al.”

Cochran spent 10 days in a coma in a Colorado hospital after sustaining brain injuries in a motorcycle accident, injuries that would impair him going forward.

Valerie Romness, Cochran’s friend and de facto secretary, said the first time he wore women’s clothes was in 1994. He told Romness he saw a beautiful woman in a club, and she invited him to her trailer. During their tryst, he realized she was transgender, and his view of sexuality and gender identity was forever changed.

“He realized people who crossdressed or wore drag got lots of attention, and he decided to partake as well,” Romness said. “He had a hard time working because he couldn’t do math, and he self-medicated to cope with his trauma, but he realized he could get tips when he dressed like a woman. He wasn’t trying to be a woman, but he wanted to dress like them.”

“APD, Kiss This.”

Cochran had visited Austin before, but when he made his way into Austin on a year-long tricycle ride in 1996, Austin police arrested him.

“I think they were trying to run him out of town with tickets,” Cochran’s friend Debbie Russell said. “But instead, they pissed him off and gave him something to talk about.”

Russell, who served as chapter president of Austin’s ACLU, said unhoused people had a strong presence in Austin in the late 1990s, and Cochran, with a 6-foot trailer in tow behind his tricycle, didn’t approve of how the Austin Police Department handled “transients.”

“He wanted to write a book on how the police treat the homeless,” Russell said.

Instead, he wrote about his encounters with police in The Challenger, a street newspaper Romness started, for six months before he died.

Cochran’s own relationship with the police was fraught with tension. In Tracy Fraizer’s 2019 film Becoming Leslie, Cochran’s friends recall how APD arrested him 81 times between 1996 and 2012 on misdemeanors ranging from public camping to urinating outside, his mugshots like yearbook photos marking his time in Texas’ capitol.

Russell said Cochran wasn’t shy when it came to his attitude toward ADP. One of Cochran’s most iconic photos shows him strutting in his typical Sixth Street regalia: clear platform heels, red curls, a pink spaghetti strap crop top, and a black thong. “APD” is written in marker across his lower back, and the words “kiss this” are displayed on either side of his thong.

The Queen

“This ever-smiling man with a wiry-wild mane riding a bike in heels became the queen of Austin,” Russell said. “He wasn’t Albert anymore. He was Leslie. Leslie Alice Cochran, this walking contradiction who was neither male nor female.”

Russell said Cochran called on Romness, his hairdresser and de facto secretary, to help him legally change his name, and she obliged.

Russell said that Austin, a “haven for social rejects,” nourished Cochran, allowing him to be celebrated for his strangeness instead of denigrated for his refusal to conform.

“Leslie was this perfect bellwether,” she said. “If you didn’t like Leslie, you probably won’t like Austin.”

Romness said Austin was always weird, but Cochran cemented the slogan with every click of his heels across the pavement.

“In the early 2000s, people thought it was a privilege to see him,” she said. “Walking with Leslie was like walking with a celebrity. Some people would ask for pictures, and some people would clutch their children to their side and give him a cautious smile.”

Romness said that during annual events like South By Southwest and Austin City Limits, people would travel from other states and countries and spend their time looking for Cochran and his ever-exposed, street-toned gams.

“He was always dropping something and bending over,” she said. “It was part of his act. The first time it happened, I was completely shocked, but I got used to it. If your tire was flat, he’d bend over, show off his fanny, and change that tire.”

Romness said Cochran would tell children to stay in school, stay away from drugs, and stay off of cigarettes, all with a cigarette held between his own fingers.

When he wasn’t teasing for tips, Romness said Cochran would dumpster dive or attend storage auctions to find gifts for himself or his friends.

“Gift-giving is a really important thing for unhoused people,” she said. “It’s a prized opportunity for them to give of themselves.”

Cochran’s friends said unhoused and housed people alike have stories about him inserting himself, warranted or unwelcome, into their lives. Callaway said Cochran would work odd jobs, like bartending for house parties or spontaneously bussing tables in restaurants to get food.

“He was fearless, stubborn, smart, and fed,” Callaway chuckled.

Romness said two unhoused men she knows said they woke up with Cochran cuddled between them for warmth. He also donated some of the little money he had to help feed the homeless community.

“Whether people recognize it or not, Leslie would be kind to others in hopes that they would pay it forward,” Romness said. “That was kind of his ethos. He was fucked up, and he was mean sometimes, but for a man with so little to give, he gave of himself endlessly.”

The Mayor

Leslie was lovingly referred to as the “mayor of Austin,” and he tried to make the moniker a reality in 2000, determined to fight corporations moving into the city. He noticed how wealthy people were pricing out artists and the working class, the people Cochran believed kept Austin weird.

“He was talking about gentrification in 1999, when white people weren’t talking about it at all,” Russell said. “He prophesied about privatization and corporations then, and that wasn’t in our lexicon as progressives at that point. I wish I had listened to him more.”

Callaway said that since moving to Austin in 1984, he watched it transform from a small town to a tech capital.

“Nothing changed for a long, long time,” he said. “The Capitol was the tallest building, and everything was so laid back. Leslie wanted it to stay that way.”

Russell said the late 1990s was the beginning of a transition for Austin.

“We expected Austin to grow, but we didn’t expect the city to outspend other large Texas cities on economic development,” she said. “We spent an incredible amount to get people to move here, but we didn’t need that. They were forcing unsustainable growth. Making it cheap for developers to build and expensive for people to move in. There was no focus on the roads or public transportation, nothing to help the people who already lived here.”

Callaway said Cochran was always up to date on current events and politics, and he always had something to say about them. Cochran ran for mayor in 2000 and 2003, finishing in second place in 2000 with 7.75% of the votes in his favor. Russell held a debate for his election against Will Wynn in 2003, and she had to pick him up to bring him to the debate.

“He was dressed in Goodwill’s finest women’s suit with a skirt,” she said. “He was so ready to go , and he hands down won that debate. I realized our politics are 99% matched, so it was kind of crazy.”

Cochran’s political platform was based on respecting Austin’s culture and rejecting the allure of corporations looking to expand to the growing city.

“You’ve got to take care of the foundations first,” Cochran said in The Austin Chronicle in 2003. “A little money to help (i.e., incentives) is fine, but Smart Growth is actually Greedy Growth. It’s become a disaster, killing what we are so we can try to be like somewhere else.”

The Friend

Cochran befriended Callaway, a now 53-year-old hairdresser, when he walked by one of Callaway’s Fourth of July parties in 2000. The two met before, when Callaway would stop and take pictures with Cochran. But on this night, Callaway brought down a trunk of Halloween costumes, and all the party-goers dressed in boas and leopard-print caught Cochran’s eye.

“He saw us all on the porch looking like him, and I just thought to myself, ‘Well, this would be a fun guy to have at a party,’ so I invited him in,” Callaway said. “He told a bunch of raunchy jokes and made everyone laugh.”

As he was leaving, Callaway told him to stop by whenever he wanted.

“For the next several months, I would walk up on my front porch and see Leslie on the stoop or asleep in my hammock,” he said. “Leslie found me; I didn’t find Leslie.”

Callaway said Cochran’s friend group was an unlikely melding of people who would have never crossed paths if not for him.

“Nothing is the same about us except for Leslie,” Callaway said. “Lawyers, hairdressers, artists – he found us through necessity and kept us for friendship.”

Russell said he’d call her when he needed legal help, Bob Baird when he needed money, Ruby Martin for haircuts, and Romness for paperwork.

“He had the connects,” she said.

Romness said she moved to Austin in 1982 and got involved in the city’s early club scene, where she struggled with addiction and housing insecurity. She befriended a group of unhoused people on the corner of Barton Springs and Lamar, and in 1990, she got sober and became an advocate for the unhoused. Romness said the city shut down the tent camp in 1996, the year Leslie came to Austin. Forty unhoused people lived there.

Romness said that in 2000, Cochran started to trust her. He got his hair cut at the Clip Joint, where Romness worked, and when he was in the hospital, he would call the salon to get a ride from her.

“He was either getting beat up or having seizures, but either way, he needed time to recover,” she said. “He trusted me, and I trusted him to come to my home.”

Cochran slept on the street, in backyards, behind businesses, and on friends’ couches during his time in Austin, bringing along his collection of discount Western movies. He said the values of ethics, honor, and justice represented in Westerns matched his own values.

When he was to stay at Romness’ home, she said he had to let her know before he came over.

“He often let me know he was coming by waiting for me on my porch,” she said. “He had a cell phone, and he was supposed to call, but he would just sit on the porch.”

While he was oftentimes an unruly houseguest (sneaking food, forgetting to use the ashtray, rearranging furniture, and breaking things in the name of fixing them), Romness said Cochran never had ill intentions.

“He wasn’t just an unhoused person I helped,” she said. “He was my friend. He let me be myself. For a single woman to break the marriage and family stereotype, I was subverting expectations like he was. I knew I could be happy in other situations, and he let me be.”

She said he was like a brother to her, that when he’d take his street outfit off to shower, he was just Leslie.

“All of his friends had this immense respect for him as a person,” she said. “We kept his dignity intact by listening to him and sharing with him and integrating him into our lives. If he was drinking, he’d tell me stories that went on for hours about Trapper Al or his childhood. I think he was processing later in his life, and I was safe to talk to.”

Callaway said Cochran was a “damn good listener,” a pack rat, a gift-giver, and a reliable friend.

“I think I took him for granted,” Callaway said. “I always thought he was going to be here.”

The Decline

Callaway said Cochran’s health declined in tandem with his view of Austin. After the 2008 financial crisis and economic recession, Russell said tourists and Austinites stopped tipping Cochran.

Russell said Cochran started getting money from his mother, and that upset his siblings. Romness said that around this time, any time money was brought up to Cochran, he started having stress-related seizures, a byproduct of his earlier brain injury.

“He wasn’t weird anymore,” Callaway said. “He dropped the facade. It was hard, and I could see he was depressed. That’s why he was so jovial around people. But when we’d sit on the porch, I could see this sadness in his eyes.”

In 2009, Cochran’s mother died. His favorite actor, Patrick Swayze, died in September of that year. In October, Romness said Cochran had a seizure and was unconscious for two weeks.

Austinites got worried when they didn’t see their unofficial mascot on the street for days, and Russell said people wanted accurate updates about Cochran’s health. That’s when she started Love for Leslie, a Facebook group to communicate with his supporters.

“When he woke up, I told him, ‘People think you’re dead,’” Romness said. “He laughed and said, ‘I know, I love it.’ He was a total drama queen.”

Russell held a press conference with Cochran when he got out of the hospital.

“The media wanted to talk to him, and we sat around a little table and talked,” she said. “He had them just charmed.”

Romness kept him at her house for five days, and he “flew the coop” on day five while she was at work.

“I’ve got a life to live,” Cochran told her.

Romness said Cochran evolved into a poor, lonely man. Clad in a t-shirt, jacket, and pants, he “stopped looking like Leslie and started looking like any other homeless man,” Romness said.

He was talking about leaving Austin for Colorado because it was changing, and he didn’t feel like he was welcome anymore.

“Austin doesn’t love me anymore,” he told Russell.

She said the hospital shaved his head, and he started losing his teeth, so she bought him a purple wig and a pink wig to make him “feel like Leslie.”

He got turned down for Social Security income, he blamed Romness for “filling out the forms wrong,” and he marched into the office and declared that he was struggling and needed help.

“He got his first check two weeks later,” Romness said. “I let him blame me. Money from the government was the last resort for a man who valued his independence so much.”

His alcoholism and brain injuries took a toll on his body, his friends said. In June 2011, Cochran called Callaway from his hospital bed and invited Callaway to take him to see a movie. Callaway said Cochran got confused several times, and he didn’t look like himself.

Russell said Cochran “got trapped in his own memories” between 2011 and 2012. He insisted he was ready to go back to Colorado, so Russell stuffed a duffle bag with long johns, warm socks, sweatshirts, all things to get him ready for winter weather.

“People who are getting ready to depart will talk about going on a trip,” Romness said. “They need to talk about death, but they don’t want to say it out loud, so they talk about a trip.”

Romness said Cochran kept stopping by her house to “get his papers” for Colorado, but she said she knew he was coming to say goodbye, finding excuses to come by to have more time together.

“Near the end, I let him shower at my place, and he kept saying ‘thank you’ over and over again,” she said. “He must’ve said it 20 times, just over and over again.”

The last time Romness saw Cochran upright and jovial was when he stopped by to talk about his trip to Colorado.

“I took a photo of him, and he did the hook ‘em horns with dirty nails, hospital bracelets and, most importantly, pants,” she said. “When he left, and I watched him walk away, he said, ‘rock on.’ That was my Leslie.”

His friends and some media gathered at an Amtrak station on the day Cochran was supposed to board a train for Colorado. When he didn’t show up, Romness said she knew something was wrong. She had medical power of attorney for him at that point, and she knew she’d have to go through the hospitals to find him.

The first hospital she checked, Leslie was there – on the fifth floor of St. David’s South Austin Medical, unconscious, with a bandage wrapped around his head. Doctors said he had a seizure in a bakery parking lot, and EMS picked him up after someone reported him unconscious.

Romness called his sister and let her know, and his friends had their final visits.

Romness said she visited him every day, sometimes twice a day. After several weeks, doctors did a brain test to see what capacity Cochran had, and the results were poor.

At the end of February 2012, she showed up to take him off of life support, and all of his friends were in his room. Cochran was awake. His friends asked him if he wanted to go.

“We’re gonna take everything off, and you don’t have to worry about this anymore,” Callaway said.

Callaway said Cochran opened his eyes, looked all the way around the room, and he gave the friends a thumbs up, and then closed his eyes. Russell said once his feeding tube was out, his friends held his hands and talked to him.

He didn’t even want water once his breathing tube was out, and Romness said she knew he was ready to go.

Cochran was moved to Hospice Austin’s Christopher House the next day, and Romness said she went to see him. She washed his face, plucked the dirt out of his eyebrows, and Cochran reached over and patted her leg. Romness said she was emotionally exhausted.

Russell said he inhabited the biggest room, big enough for his motley crew of friends to say goodbye. To ensure no unwanted visitors snuck in, the friends dubbed “leopard print” the secret password. The group held vigils and asked the public to sign posters for his room.

On the last day of Cochran’s life, Romness wore her black cowboy hat to the hospice.

“I told him to stay on the train,” she said. “I wanted him to hear my voice, to know that he didn’t have to come back to me. He just needed to stay on the train. He was in my dream that night, and I knew.”

When she woke up, she had a voicemail. Leslie Alice Cochran died on March 8, 2012, at 12:45 a.m.

Coincidentally, Russell had already lobbied Mayor Lee Leffingwell to declare March 8 Leslie Day in the City of Austin.

Russell said the funeral home gave Cochran the casket, the service, and the burial plot for free.

“He’s buried in between priests and babies, and we know Leslie would think that was just fuckin’ hilarious,” she said.

During the end of his life and for seven years after, local director Fraizer worked with Martin, who’d videotaped Cochran, on a documentary about Cochran’s life called Becoming Leslie, a film Fraizer hoped would be a source of income for the struggling performer. It premiered in 2019 at SXSW.

As the executive director of Austin’s street association, Russell got a plaque installed in front of Cochran’s main haunt, the building of the old Black Cat bar. It stands to teach younger Austinites and tourists about the value of being an authentic person, no matter how weird or misunderstood one might be.

“Not having the money or means to be housed doesn’t stop me from living a full and fruitful life,” Leslie said. “I’m not homeless. Austin is my home.”