Vaudeville is a variety-show style of performance born in late 1700s France. These variety shows featured acts centered around the raw talent of the individual performer: ventriloquism, trapeze artists, trained animals, contortionists, and most notably featured both male and female ‘drag’ illusionists. As early as the 1800s, male performers would don female personas for novelty’s sake, as well as to attract audiences by offering a different type of performance. A relevant example of this I found was that there was a growing number of male ventriloquists, but very few females popularly pursuing this art. As a result, some men would give a ‘female illusion’ while also performing with their doll, but billed themselves simply as female ventriloquists. Many of these ‘illusionist’ acts involved a reversal of the illusion as part of the performance; often the performer would remove his wig and reveal himself to the audience as a man in drag as part of the spectacle of the act, much to the audience’s delight. This is very similar to last weeks Pantomime Dames, where the audience’s enjoyment is derived from watching a man perform as a woman for comedic or theatrical effect, without much deeper substance behind the performance than that.
What interests me more about these Vaudeville performers is that some of them carried their ‘female illusion’ out into their everyday lives. There were performers like Bobbie Kimber, who performed in Music Halls from the 1930’s to the 1960’s, who ‘wore his hair long like a woman’s, and never divulged his biological gender one way or the other to the audience’. Bobbie was one of the female ventriloquists I mentioned, and ‘according to fellow performers, he played the woman offstage as well, and the public didn’t know he was biologically male until 1952’. Bobbie was married with a wife and daughter, so the specificities of his gender identity could be contested, but for one reason or another Bobbie’s ‘drag’ persona moved fluidly from performance to everyday life, until the end of his career in the 60s. I was able to find a number of other female illusionists who also presented as female in their daily lives as well , many who remained unmarried for their entire lives. The ‘illusionists’ who maintained their illusions offstage, both fortunately and unfortunately, began giving the public and the government reason to begin drawing links between homosexuality and gender-bending, resulting in what was called the ‘Pansy Craze’ of the 1920s and 30s. The Pansy Craze was a simultaneous explosion and suppression of gay culture localized primarily in New York’s Greenwich Village and in Harlem. There was a notable emergence in Gay subculture all over the USA, which fit into the ‘anything goes’ category of those consuming illicit drink under the prohibition of the time. Next time I will be watching Paris is Burning to further explore this emerging gay scene in Harlem, which is where many aspects of modern drag culture originate.
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