Case Studies

If one opened the New York Daily News one August day in 1935 and looked between promotions for mint condition stamp collections and free samples from yarn purveyors to interested knitters, one could find a small, yet surprising advertisement placed by a C. Starr. He—I presume the gender pronoun here—was selling “THEATRICAL BOOTS” and other five-inch heeled shoes. Next to the large headline, a drawing of a black shoe (featuring a heel much taller than five inches) accompanied the advertisement. Long before any popular popular awareness of Starr’s fetishwear reference, the advertisement’s multivalent references were likely lost on the general newspaper reader at the time. But for those “in the know,” it was clear that Starr’s advertisement peddled more than clothing, whether sexual consumption or production of adult entertainment. For two dollars, roughly the equivalent of $40 in 2021, the potential customer would receive a price list and, more importantly, fifteen postcard-sized photos of models wearing the accoutrements for sale. Beside the theatrical boots, they included tight-laced corsets, rubber busts, and hosiery. In one fell swoop, thus, Starr was able to place an advertisement in one of the largest newspapers in the United States, while simultaneously and ingeniously maintaining his ability to express multiple meanings—one to the unknowing audience, one to his intended consumers—a feat replicating queer aesthetic strategies at the time.

In the case study “'‘An Expanse of Hairy Chest Above a Beaded Brassiere’,” I analyze the reporting around a burlesque comedian, Bobby Morris, as an especially interesting agent introducing minoritarian cultural references—a proto-queer form of camp—to the majority culture through his performance in the liminal space of the burlesque theatre. Morris actively queered burlesque’s longstanding convention of “awarishness,” initiated in the earliest days of Lydia Thompson. He took Thompson’s attitude and combined it with the visual codes and cues of the strippers and the teasers of the 1930s, joined them with queer references, gender transgression, gestures, and clothing and claimed a defiant sexuality to boot. Parallel to the “alien” genders embodied by Thompson’s company at the fin-de-siècle and strongly contrasting with other female impersonators around the same time, Morris’s queer references, transgressions, gestures, and defiance introduced the heterosexual majoritarian audiences in the burlesque theatre to subcultural codes and likely encouraged queer readings of his body for any minoritarian audiences present in the theatre. Morris’s body emerges as attractive, interesting, and complex, and questions simple notions of stereotypical representations of “pansies” on the burlesque stage and anti-gay hoots and jeers in the audience.

In the case study “Camping in the Clubs and the County Courts,” I closely investigate the legal battles fought by the eleven “Playboys” who performed at a tavern in Troy, New York. The legal cases and the discursive media accounts that I discuss in the case study never openly construed the artists as gay, homosexual or differently gendered. It left them in a completely different register, an indeterminate form of embodiment not completely legible in the early twentieth-century lexicons of identity. Their refusal of recognition or response to the call of interpellation is understood here as particularly agentic; their queerness denotes that which offers no simple answer to the question: “Who are you?” As such, theirs was an apolitical position, or more precisely a denial of the scene of politics to begin with. The performers' acts, in and out of the court, thus, centered wild forms of self-made gender presentations, or what Jack Halberstam has called “indeterminate modes of embodiment” in his book Wild Things, rendering Echo Tavern a utopian space or life-world of queer belonging where the pressures of heteronormativity and its gendered forms of respectability and legibility subsided in favor of a different, queer and wild epistemology.