Memoriae Lectoris

Excerpts from my readings.

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DISCLAIMER

This blog is born out of my need to keep track of references I may use in the future for personal projects.

I don’t necessarily agree with anything that is shared here.  If it sounds racist, homophobic, transphobic or anything hateful or outright lies, I intend to keep them because of that for many reasons, like to keep track of how people’s conceptions changed over time or to compare with other sources.

Anyone is more than welcome to share more information or what they think about what I’m sharing. If you want to destroy an excerpt, feel at ease of doing so as long you understand you’re fighting the author’s point of view and not mine. I’m also very open to discuss anything I share here as long as it’s in an educational discussion. This Tumblr contains a lot of triggering content and I do my best to tag them but remember this blog is intended for my own use. I may not tag something because it is not useful to me. By reading my posts, you are responsible for your own mental wellbeing. 

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The tags aren't always meant to be precise for various reasons. Booklist Tag Taglist (Forever a work in progress) 2026 Readings

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In the late 1920s, vaudeville performers struggled to continue engaging their audiences and failed to maintain their exorbitant salaries. Their decline was a precipitous and unpleasant one. By 1928, Eva Tanguay was earning just 15 percent of the salary she earned in 1911. The rise of the motion picture industry contributed enormously to the demise of the vaudeville theater and the performers who gained their fame and fortune before its footlights. Beginning in the mid-1920s, many vaudeville houses began shortening their performance bills, which had previously included between six and ten separate acts, reducing them slowly and even replacing them with short films.” Eventually, many of these houses closed for renovations and reopened as movie theaters. By 1929, the Great Depression depleted the disposable income of most working- and middle-class Americans, as well as the fortunes of many of its performers, helping to seal the fate of vaudeville.

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[...] They tapped into a deeply rooted tradition of transgressive black pageantry dating back to Pinkster and N*gro Election Day festivals that American slaves celebrated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Providing a compelling black history of what she calls “crimes of fashion,” Miller explains these festivals “featured parades and dances of slaves dressed to the nines in clothing normally reserved for their social and racial betters." Because antebellum customs reveal deep-seated white anxiety over black men and women wearing ostentatious clothing, these were not insignificant sartorial statements. Some whites found the extravagances of black men and women so menacing, they outlawed them. In the mid-eighteenth century, Charleston and New Orleans passed statutes to prevent black “crimes of fashion.” And they invented curious punishments for violations of new sumptuary codes: slave owners punished rebellious male slaves by forcing them to wear women’s clothing. [...] In the twentieth century, these tensions were still being negotiated on the vaudeville stage where performers like Brown turned such traditions on their head by choosing to dress as a man. Through payment and applause, black cross-dressers turned what was previously a punishment into a handsome reward.

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In Staging Race, Karen Sotiropoulos argues that black vaudevillians helped forge a respectable black middle class: “Artists’ stage success enabled them to purchase some of the first brownstones in Harlem available to African Americans and their organizations’ fundraising events, held uptown, became central to the social world of Harlem’s new black professional class.”

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When portrayed by an African American performer, the significance of the well-dressed dandy shifted dramatically. As dandies, black male im-personators participated in a discourse that was as much about gender as it was about class, modernity, and the future of the race. In the twentieth century, the dandy became the most popular type portrayed by the black male impersonator and existing photographs suggest that Brown portrayed them almost exclusively. Undermining decades of white performers portraying grotesque black buffoons and white female impersonators blacking up to denigrate the unattractive “funny ole gal,” in the twentieth century, black women took to the Stage to present the black man as a sharp-dressed modern cosmopolitan.

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Most major American cities did not explicitly ban cross-dressing until the 1940s or later, but from 1900 to the 1960s, several women were arrested for charges related to cross-dressing. Newspapers sensationalized the transgressions of women, black and white, as young as nineteen and as old as sixty-six, who dressed in men’s clothes, arresting them for vagrancy, forgery, larceny, masquerading, and even white slavery.

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As thousands of women flocked to drag balls and cabarets to ogle and flirt with male impersonators, the styles black male impersonators exhibited on stage became increasingly popular on the streets of Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1933, after Brown had performed in men’s suits for over thirty years, The Baltimore Afro-American noted the appearance of mannish clothing for all women: “Little shops had on display special three-piece suits for women, mannish hats and broad-toed shoes. Special loose collared shirts of dainty materials, and even underthings of masculine cut” could be found “in the windows of haberdasheries all over Harlem.” The newspaper noted that while “male impersonators on the stage have been well known and many have won fame by these characterizations,” male attire for women “as an everyday proposition is another thing altogether.”

[...] This article conveyed that what many Harlemites considered suitable on stage was not so on the street. More importantly, the commentary suggested that black women were not only watching male impersonators on the stage, but, to the dismay of black men, choosing to emulate them on the street and “in the family."

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White male impersonators also modified their perspectives as narrators, opting to sing in the third-person to discourage audiences from making autobiographical connections between the lyrics and the singer. Whereas the previous generation of male impersonators sang in the first person about specific experiences of love with women, the second generation of male impersonators sang about “the dangers of women” in a general way. When they did sing in the first person, it was often from the perspective of young, sexually inexperienced boys rather than men. In addition to using the third person, after 1900, male impersonators less frequently sang songs also performed by male singers. The strategies these women used to differentiate themselves from inverts and men meant “there was little except their costumes to distinguish male impersonators from other female singers in vaudeville.” [...] If audiences interpreted performances as autobiographical, this posed a real risk to male impersonators. One scholar claims that male impersonators “constantly trod a fine line between two different perversions. If they appeared to be too realistically masculine, they were open to charges of lesbianism, but if the male characters were portrayed as too effeminate, they could appear to be homosexual and therefore distasteful for an increasingly middle-class audience that included women.

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[...] the logic behind the ruling issued in 1915 by Yale University administrators who barred actors from impersonating females for more than one consecutive year.” If white men impersonating women for more than a year were likely to become womanly off stage, white women impersonating men could do so safely only “for the moment.”

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In her examination of the evolution of male impersonation from 1860 to 1930, Gillian Rodger divides male impersonators into three generations. According to Rodger, critics praised the first, active between 1860 and 1880, for the realism of their male impersonations. For example, Annie Hindle, the first woman to achieve international fame as a male impersonator in the 1870s, “specialized in realistic male impersonations: she shaved regularly to try to effect a shadow of a mustache, and her low voice added to the overall impression of a sexy masculinity.” Over the next two decades, male impersonators grew less realistic. By 1900, audiences saw the “third and last generation” of male impersonators in “a fundamentally new way.’ Instead of praising their realism, at the dawn of the twentieth century, critics emphasized male impersonators’ unique personalities and celebrated how unmanly their male impersonations had become. [...] Many third-generation white male impersonators discouraged anything suggesting realism in their performances. Historian Sharon Ullman argues that, though many female impersonators aspired to fool their audience, most male impersonators “were judged on the degree to which ‘real men’ could differentiate themselves from them. That differentiation helped mark critical signs of masculinity in an increasingly public contest over the ownership of male political and social privileges.” Whereas white men like Eltinge portrayed sexually mature hyper-white ladies, white male impersonators typically played pre-pubescent boys. In fact, many white male impersonators permitted audiences to laugh at women’s deliberately failed attempts to look authentically manly. Yet Eltinge embodied an idealized version of modern womanhood and advised white women how to be better versions of themselves by endorsing the latest fashions, cosmetics, and diets. In the late 1920s, when Eltinge’s career began its precipitous decline and discomfort over homosexuality began to heighten, many white gender impersonators felt pressure to make their performances less realistic. At a time when Florenz Ziegfeld’s slim, white chorus girls could weigh no more than 125 pounds, opportunities for less than petite white actresses, singers, and dancers were few. It is not surprising, then that white male impersonators were rarely large in stature and that critics celebrated and exaggerated their diminutive size, in part to demonstrate how unmanly they truly were.

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In The Color of Race in America, Matthew Guterl explains that in 1900 (at the beginning of Eltinge’s career) Americans read race through language, religion, nationality, class status, and color. However, over the next forty years, race came to be recognized almost solely for its “optical qualities,” making it “possible for anyone who spoke English, looked ‘white,’ and subscribed to state patriotism” to therefore “lay claim to the civic privileges of Nordicism. This new sense of race was not just rooted in science, not just in an evolving political economy of racial difference, but also in a new visual sense of what race looked like.” Guterl concludes that “the story of race in modern America is far messier, and far less inevitable, than previously supposed. [...] Though scholars such as David Roediger readily acknowledge constructing whiteness was a “gendered phenomenon,” gender was bound with race in ways that we have not yet fully appreciated.' Whitening products like Eltinge’s made the illusion of hyper-white femininity more accessible, helping immigrants and working women to feign or solidify their tenuous grasp on whiteness. To different groups of women, Eltinge conveyed the message that differences in skin tone perceived among immigrants were not as important as those differences among men and women. Yet, in doing so, Eltinge drew attention to the fact that both race and gender were artifice—unstable constructions that could be adopted, adapted, and appropriated by anyone.

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Peiss argues that “notions of Anglo-American beauty in the nineteenth century were continually asserted in relation to people of color around the world” so much so that “travelers, missionaries, anthropologists, and scientists habitually viewed beauty as a function of race.” Beautiful white skin on women, therefore, demonstrated the advanced state of American civilization. But wearing too much makeup also posed potential dangers. For much of the nineteenth century, Americans associated painted faces with prostitutes. By the turn of the twentieth century, however, working and middle-class women could artfully apply makeup and create a natural white look, implying sexual, social, and racial respectability in the same way Eltinge did on stage. Not only could the average woman carefully apply whitening powder, lipstick, and blush without inviting doubts about her character, but many working immigrant women in Eltinge’s audiences would have also viewed whitening up as a matter of professional and social prudence. In his seminal work on the construction of whiteness, David Roediger recalled W.E.B. DuBois’s argument that even white workers who “received a low wage [were] compensated in part by a public and psychological wage.” Roediger argues “the pleasures of whiteness could function as a ‘wage’ for white workers. That is, status and privileges conferred by race could be used to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships.”

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The reporter’s choice to linger on the “superb” and “dead” whiteness of Eltinge’s female persona is particularly telling given the rising popularity of sunbathing. In fact, tanning was so common that Florenz Ziegfeld paid his pale, leggy chorus girls bonuses at the end of the summer for not getting a tan. Recasting women as indoor ornaments to be tucked away from the elements yet publicly displayed on stage, Eltinge and Ziegfeld’s efforts demonstrate the work American men performed in maintaining interdependent racial and gender boundaries in the early twentieth century. As the manliness of overly-civilized, soft American male urbanites came increasingly in to question, the excessive paleness of women became ever more important.

Racial and gendered ideologies about American beauty had long been connected to class, as laborers were more likely to work outdoors and be leaner than the middle and upper classes, whose lifestyles and ample diets enabled a paler complexion and fuller figure. Swarthy complexions and dirty faces were often attributed to Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants, regardless of actual complexion.

[...] Out of makeup, critics noted his “dark brown hair and dark eyes” complemented the healthy hue of his natural complexion, which, taken together, provided physical evidence of the manly hours he spent laboring outdoors on his farm. In this new context, pale skin no longer denoted wealth for men, but signified a questionable distance from the strenuous life outdoors. A tanned complexion, then, provided evidence of masctlinity earned outdoors.

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[...] By the first decade of the twentieth century, boxing had become the quintessential masculine, working-class sport, notorious for its excessive violence and bloodshed. In 1894, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, one of the most prolific and influential contemporary feminist writers, declaimed boxing as a symbol of the decay of white civilization, invoking a popular racist trope by describing a prizefight as “a scene of savagery which would not have been out of place in the heart of Africa.” The same year Eltinge urged women to box, Congress even outlawed violent films depicting boxing in the aftermath of black boxer Jack Johnson’s defeat of Jim Jeffries and the ensuing race riots. Whether imagined in the “heart of Africa” or a professional ring in urban America, boxing was a thoroughly manly and primitive pursuit.

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F. Michael Moore argues that Eltinge’s blackface productions flopped because “blackface entertainment was on the decline. Yet Eltinge appeared as the Sampson Girl in 1908, while other performers continued successfully to perform in blackface through the 1920s. Even when white actors stopped using burnt cork, they did not altogether abandon blackface performance styles, including speech patterns such as dialect and nostalgic plantation-style, Southern songs.

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As a New York Herald Tribune article from 1934 makes clear, at drag balls, inversions of race and class were at least as central as experimentations with gender: “Caucasians came disguised as Orientals. Mongoloid individuals blackened their faces and appeared as Ethiopians. N*groes powdered their skins and dressed as Scandinavian villagers. College boys masqueraded as hoboes." And, of course, “Men danced with women in men’s clothes. Women danced with men in women’s clothes.”

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Behind references to tribes, critics conveyed that their concerns over female impersonation were rooted in anxieties over the decline of American civilization. As a man who wore women’s clothing and was occasionally genuinely mistaken for a woman, Eltinge obliterated the separate spheres supposedly occupied by American men and women and threatened their physical containment within the body. The erosion of the differences between the way men and women dressed, talked and walked threatened to turn civilized Americans into the so-called savages of Africa and Asia.

To many, female impersonation and the unprecedented success of individuals like Eltinge inspired uncomfortable introspection, forcing audiences and critics to question their own complicity in such supposed perversions. As the nation’s premier female impersonator seemed to lead America away from the civilized, respectable society it believed itself to be, some critics “feared that American manhood was going to hell in a wig, dress, and high-heeled shoes.’”