Before Muhlaysia
dallasvoice.comDallas trans author’s new book tells the story of her friend’s murder, and imagines getting revenge DAVID TAFFET | Senior Staff Writer taffet@dallasvoice.com Two decades before the assault on Muhlaysia Booker followed by her murder made national headlines, there was Tanesha Duvall, a Dallas transgender woman who was shot in the head for no other reason than that she was a transgender woman.
Brandee F. Kassadine has written about her experience as a witness in the trial of Duvall’s murderer, asking, “What if we got revenge?” She explores the options in her book A Diva’s Revenge, set to be released Saturday, Sept.
17. She’s already written a sequel, and it is set for a Valentine’s Day release. Kassadine said at the time she met Duvall, she was a student at Walt Whitman High School, the experimental and ahead-of-its-time LGBTQ school that started on the campus of Cathedral of Hope before moving to its own building on Maple Avenue.
She described Duvall as “ahead of her time” and “more mature in her transition.” She was convincing, Kassadine said, adding “If you’d seen her, you wouldn’t know.” But that led Duvall to be “reckless and dangerous. [She] didn’t tell guys that she was transgender.” Kassadine remembers being there when Duvall met Michael Manning, the man who eventually killed her. “We were driving,” Kassadine recalled, saying that Duvall pointed Manning out to her, and “I told her he looked good in a tank top.” The two young women stopped in a liquor store parking lot where Duvall and Manning exchanged pager numbers. (It was, afterall, the year 2001, Kassadine pointed out.) Then Duvall paged Manning, and Manning paged her back.
