A Brief History of Male Impersonation
Notes From the Telegraph Club #5
This is the fifth installment in my series Notes From the Telegraph Club, which dives into the research I did to write my most recent novel, Last Night at the Telegraph Club. I do my best to avoid major spoilers, but I do mention some things that happen in the book in order to explore the historical context. I don’t believe that knowing some plot points will spoil this book, but if you’d like to avoid all potential spoilers, you may wish to read the book before reading these essays.
At the beginning of Last Night at the Telegraph Club, Lily Hu is drawn to a nightclub ad in the San Francisco Chronicle.
“It read: TOMMY ANDREWS MALE IMPERSONATOR—WORLD PREMIERE! THE TELEGRAPH CLUB. 462 BROADWAY. It was a relatively large ad that included a photo of a person who looked like a handsome man with his hair slicked back, dressed in a tuxedo. Something went still inside Lily, as if her heart had taken a breath before it continued beating.”
The Telegraph Club was inspired by many of the real lesbian nightclubs that existed in San Francisco in the 1940s and 50s, and Tommy Andrews was inspired by the male impersonators who performed at them.
Today we no longer use the term “male impersonator” to describe a woman who performs onstage as a man; today we’d use the term “drag king.” But male impersonation was once a popular and mainstream entertainment, and some male impersonators were famous enough to tour nationally.
In today’s Notes From the Telegraph Club, I offer a brief (ish) history of male impersonation, and some thoughts on its connections with drag.
A Brief History of Male Impersonation
In the United States, professional male impersonation on the vaudeville and variety circuit began in the nineteenth century. Although male (and female) impersonation had long been part of the theatrical world, and actresses were sometimes allowed to play young male roles (such as Romeo in Romeo and Juliet), it differed from what we call “drag” today. In its earliest years, male impersonation was not queer-coded, and it was usually performed by heterosexual women.
In Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Stage, historian Gillian Rodger explains that early male impersonators were quite realistically masculine, and were played by older American women. But by the late 1870s, the male roles became younger and more feminine, and the most popular male impersonators came from England.
Rodger notes that the audiences for male impersonators were predominantly men in the beginning, although women did also attend performances. Early on, male impersonators provided commentary on masculinity, but as gender norms shifted, so did their performances.
In the late nineteenth century, sexologists began to construct theories about homosexuality and homosexuals, whom they described as “inverts.” Many of these theories are now understood to be transphobic and harmful, but they were also the beginnings of the modern understanding of the term lesbian. In Sapphistries, historian Leila J. Rupp writes that “female masculinity, either as a characteristic of a woman or as her object of attraction, defined the female invert.”
In the 1880s and 1890s, Rodger explains that “fears about the mannish woman developed alongside those about the effeminate man.” Professional male impersonators, in order to conform to social norms, had to be masculine-presenting onstage but also noticeably female.
By the 1910s, Rodger writes, “the songs sung by male impersonators could, for the most part, be seen as expressing the aspirational dreams of young boys male impersonators.” By the 1920s, “male impersonation no longer reflected or commented on American masculinity, and, as a performance style, it was completely constrained by the demands of femininity.” Some male impersonators would even change clothes onstage in order to show the audience that they were women.
Were they lesbians?
Annie Hindle (1870s or 1880s)
Among all the male impersonators that Rodgers researched for Just One of the Boys, the vast majority appeared to be heterosexual women, or at least women who had publicly documented intimate relationships with men. She only found two male impersonators who had publicly documented intimate relationships with other women: Annie Hindle and Ella Wesner.
Annie Hindle was an immigrant from England who began her onstage career in 1868, when she was about 20 years old; Rodger identifies her as “the first male impersonator to appear on the American variety stage.” Her performances involved singing and telling jokes while she played a variety of men of different ages and classes.
It was rumored that Hindle had intimate relationships with several of her dressers, and in 1886 she married one of them, Annie Ryan. Their marriage was sensationalized in the news, and Hindle’s gender was questioned vigorously in the press. Rodger writes that “Hindle eventually agreed with the journalist’s assertions that she was a man in order to be rid of the harassment.”
However, this did not appear to end her career, possibly because she was long established by this time, and she continued performing as a male impersonator. In December 1891, Annie Ryan died, and in 1892, Hindle married another woman, Louise Spangehl. In a story about the wedding, The Pittsburgh Dispatch reported that the minister who performed the wedding had believed Hindle was a man.
Ella Wesner, one of Hindle’s contemporaries, had been a ballet dancer and actor before she became a male impersonator in 1870. Her performances, like Hindle’s, involved singing, but Wesner also danced, sometimes with a female partner, and always while dressed as a man.
Ella Wesner (1872)
In 1872, Wesner met Josie Mansfield, an actress who had been the mistress of a wealthy New York businessman who was murdered by a business rival—who was another of Mansfield’s lovers. Mansfield then became involved with Wesner, and in October 1873, the two of them left America together, abandoning Wesner’s previously scheduled engagements. They spent several months in Europe, but in March 1873, Wesner returned to America on her own. Wesner and Mansfield’s relationship was still remembered nearly twenty years later in 1891, when the New York Sun noted that “the only romance in [Wesner’s] life was her well-known escapade with Josie Mansfield, the notorious.”
Even if a male impersonator was heterosexual, she still often attracted the attentions of lesbians. One of the most famous English male impersonators of the early twentieth century was Vesta Tilley, who took care to be respectable and heterosexual in her private life, but wrote about her encounters with ardent female fans in her autobiography.
In Sarah Maitland’s biography of Vesta Tilley, she writes:
“She could also enjoy, and obviously did, a certain amount of lesbian-oriented devotion from her fans without having to take responsibility for it. Her Recollections are illuminating on the rare occasions when she acknowledged this sort of devotion. She patently did enjoy the power she had, but managed at the same time to be dismissive (if not insulting) about its motivation.”
Male Impersonation Goes Underground
By the 1920s, mainstream professional male impersonation fell out of vogue, although English male impersonators including Vesta Tilley, Hetty King, and Ella Shields continued to tour the U.S. and draw large audiences. If American audiences found their gender transgression disturbing, they could comfort themselves with the fact that they were foreigners.
The idea that gender deviance could be tolerated in foreigners continued into the 1930s, most notably with Marlene Dietrich. “Dietrich never assumed a male character but rather used a men’s suit to signal her potent sexuality that was not bounded by ‘normal’ desire,” Rodger writes.
Gender nonconformity was more welcome in non-white, non-mainstream spaces, such as Harlem in the 1920s and 30s. Blues singers Lucille Bogan and Ma Rainey sang about “bulldagger” women appreciatively, and Gladys Bentley (“Broadway’s Queen of Song and Jazz”) wore men’s clothing in public and didn’t hide her gender nonconformity onstage.
In 1931, she married a white woman in a New Jersey civil ceremony. According to historian Lilian Faderman, this was common among lesbians, and a marriage license could be obtained by masculinizing one of the women’s names or getting a gay man to assist.
While Bentley wasn’t a male impersonator in the Vesta Tilley mold, she clearly employed masculinity onstage, often deliberately. In Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance, James F. Wilson writes:
“Examining the creative output of her career as well as contemporary accounts of her personal and professional life, one sees that Bentley toyed with and manipulated the social, sexual, and artistic conventions of her era. At times parodying these norms and at others embracing them, Gladys Bentley simultaneously subverted the rigid dualities of male/female, hetero/homosexual, and black/white. 'She was,' as Langston Hughes said, 'something worth discovering.’”
Gladys Bentley (circa 1940)
In the 1940s, as Bentley’s Harlem career began to decline, she moved west and performed first in Los Angeles and then in San Francisco at Mona’s 440, a lesbian bar that advertised itself as the place “Where Girls Will Be Boys.” Bentley was billed as the “Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs” and openly flirted with women in the audience while dressed in her tuxedo.
Mona’s 440 often featured male impersonators who dressed in tuxedos and often replaced standard song lyrics with openly gay ones. But these performances were not like the touring shows of Vesta Tilley in the 1920s or even those of Annie Hindle in the 1880s. Performances at nightclubs such as Mona’s 440 were no longer respectable; they had slid across the line into sex tourism, and in some cases sex work.
Nonetheless, nightclub owners endeavored to stay on the right side of shifting laws around cross-dressing and alcohol sales. Several San Francisco clubs advertised male and female impersonators well into the 1950s, despite multiple bar raids and plenty of police harassment of those who were gender nonconforming.
In New York in 1955, Black jazz singer Stormé Delarverie began her career as a male impersonator with the Jewel Box Revue, a touring company of female impersonators. Delarverie was the ensemble’s only woman, and she stayed with them for 14 years, proving that though male impersonation was no longer mainstream, it had not died. It had just gone underground.
Stormé Delarverie (circa 1950s)
Finding a Link to Today’s Drag Kings
In a 1997 article titled “Mackdaddy, Superfly, Rapper: Gender, Race, and Masculinity in the Drag King Scene,” queer theorist Jack Halberstam wrote:
“Various theories circulate about why there have been so few drag kings, even in the lively butch-femme bar culture of the 1950s ... I also wonder whether the claims about an apparent lack of a lesbian drag culture depend on the historical sources available to us. Could it be that while white lesbian communities produced no drag culture, black lesbian communities have housed and nurtured drag performances that remain hidden from the historical record?”
Rodger’s history of male impersonation was published twenty years after Halberstam’s article, but she still concluded that today’s drag kings are not carrying on the traditions of nineteenth-century male impersonators, and that “many of these performers have little sense that women in the past performed on American stages while realistically dressed as men.”
However, I think Halberstam was onto something in 1997. So much of queer history has been focused on white people, and Rodger’s history of male impersonation is no exception. I believe that performers like Gladys Bentley and Stormé Delarverie did carry on these male impersonation traditions—but in their own way.
As male impersonation went underground into marginalized communities, it clearly changed to fit both the performers and their audiences. It was no longer necessarily about impersonating a man, and increasingly about disrupting or refiguring masculinity.
While there may not be a straight line from Ella Shields, who completed her last tour of America in 1930, to the first self-declared drag king in the early 1970s, I believe there was a web of connection that traveled through those underground communities, including communities of color, and thus was unlikely to be documented in mainstream publications.
The character of Tommy Andrews in Last Night at the Telegraph Club draws her inspirations for her male impersonation performance from this web of connections. I imagined that Tommy grew up in San Francisco in the 1930s and ’40s as a girl with show business ambitions, who also knew early on that she was attracted to other girls. Because Gladys Bentley headlined in San Francisco in the 1940s, Tommy would have heard of her. She could very well have snuck into Mona’s 440 in her teen years to see Gladys Bentley and other male impersonators.
It seems likely that Tommy would also have heard of performers like Vesta Tilley and Ella Shields, who toured San Francisco in the 1920s. Tilley and Shields had merchandise like all touring performers did; their postcards can still be purchased today as collectors’ items. I easily imagined Tommy discovering some of that old merchandise floating around the lesbian community in San Francisco. And obviously, Tommy would have known of Marlene Dietrich.
I haven’t found extensive evidence for a drag king subculture within the lesbian community in the 1950s and ’60s either, but it’s clear that male impersonation did continue in small clubs that catered to LGBTQ people. And drag king performances eventually emerged from those small clubs, drawing inspiration from drag queens, yes, but likely also from the web of connections that has always existed in marginalized communities. I’m not sure if historians will ever discover a definitive connecting thread from mainstream male impersonators of the early twentieth century to today’s drag kings, but as an author and as a lesbian, it’s certainly not hard to imagine a connection.
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References
Disclosure: Some links go to Bookshop.org, where I am an affiliate. If you click through and make a purchase, I will earn a commission.
Boyd, Nan Alamilla. Wide-open Town: A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Halberstam, Jack. "Mackdaddy, Superfly, Rapper: Gender, Race, and Masculinity in the Drag King Scene." Social Text, no. 52/53 (1997): 105-31.
Rodger, Gillian M. Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage. Urbana; Chicago; Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2018.
Rupp, Leila J. Sapphistries: A Global History of Love between Women. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
Wilson, James F. Bulldaggers, Pansies, and Chocolate Babies: Performance, Race, and Sexuality in the Harlem Renaissance. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010.
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