Beautiful: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator, is a neat look at American cultural history and the waves in which something as seemingly queer and subversive as drag can be a tool to reinforce white gender stereotypes.
Beautiful: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator, the new book by historian Andrew L. Erdman, explores the weirdly conservative life and story of Julian Eltinge, a celebrated drag artist from the early 20th century. Much like how the US military has a long history of female impersonation traditions, Eltinge's success in vaudeville, Broadway, and beyond stemmed not from a place of radical subversion but rather from the foundational roots of American mythology.
On the surface, there's an obvious irony around the idea that a man who earned a tremendous amount of wealth by dressing up in women's clothing could also be so patriarchally and imperialistically American at its core. But that's what makes Beautiful such a fascinating book. Erdman is well aware of the colonial and white supremacist roots that have shaped the development of American iconography and uses the story of Eltinge's life to illustrate just how insidious those influences can be.
For Eltinge, gender was a literal performance. On stage, he dressed up as various women, performing miraculous feats of costume changes while also deftly reinforcing the expectations of what the ideal American (read: straight white Christian) woman should look like. But as Erdman's deeply-researched writing shows (seriously: half this book is footnotes and a bibliography that frequently finds original sources), Eltinge performed just as much offstage, too — creating the illusion of a macho, self-made man, that similar reinforced white Christian patriarchal gender stereotypes. Like so many successful American carnival barkers, Eltinge was full of shit, telling flagrant lies to sell his product. Sometimes, that product was theatre tickets; sometimes, it was a makeup line, but always, at the end of the day, that product was his image — specifically, the image of a rugged American male who pulled himself up by his bootstraps.
In this way, Erdman illustrates how there is nothing particularly queer about Eltinge's drag act — except in the sense that all presentations of gender employ some artifice and performance. But of course, only certain gender performances are seen as acceptable or authoritative. And Eltinge knew this better than most. He crafted an image of his female impersonation act in a surprisingly masculine way. He was a craftsman, you understand; he had a workshop, not a dressing room, where he used tools and empirical methods and thoughtful manly observation skills to create an authoritative embodiment of what femininity should look like. Because female impersonation was a job, not a fetish or something that Eltinge did for pleasure. Erdman does an excellent job of finding specific, primary sourced examples of this — illustrating the sadly American pedantry of Eltinge's work. Here was a white American male performing the hard labor of showing women how they were supposed to appear.
In that way, Eltinge made drag performance weirdly patriarchal.
There is, of course, the one big question looming over the book: was Eltinge actually gay, or possibly even trans? The answer may be disappointing, but not in the one you might expect. Eltinge was never married (though he did frequently fuel tabloid rumors about his own dalliances). And he certainly spent with, and around some people who were indeed in same-sex relationships. But Erdman rightly avoids speculation, or assigning identity labels to someone who may not have chosen that identity (if for no other reason than because that identity did not exist as we now define it when that person was alive). Erdman does spend some pages exploring the development of "homosexuality" as a concept, and how it differed from the long-standing tradition of men who have sex with men, or women who have sex with women. In this way, Erdman does a deft job of isolating gender from sexuality, and even examines a bit how both things existed (and changed) in relation to the greater identity of American Myth.
Erdman does not shy away from the racial aspects of Eltinge's American Mythmaking either. Eltinge spent part of his childhood in Montana, shortly after the land was "opened up" to white settlers; as a youth, he was inspired by minstrel shows that made a vaudevillian mockery of Blacks, Jews, Irish, and Native Americans (one specific show mentioned Blackface artists who would deliberately mash up "Hebrew" and Irish accents, which certainly sounds like a, erm, interesting concept). As a professional artist, Eltinge often toured alongside Blackface minstrel shows as well, sometimes even performing female impersonations of light-skinned minstrel stereotype characters. Later, as his success grew, he employed a Japanese-American assistant, Ko Shima, to help him with quick costume changes; at the start of their relationship, he admittedly assumed that Shima didn't have any English with which to communicate (a facade that Shima deliberately upheld, just to mess with Eltinge). Though they eventually became friends, Eltinge was certainly no crusader for the rights of the oppressed. He seemed like any Libertarian businessman: not consciously racist, and just as willing to befriend outright racists as he was the "right kinds" of people of color, as long as the relationship could help him out in some way.
Beautiful: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator [Andrew Erdman]
Previously:
• Drag artist wins defamation case against right-wing blogger who falsely claimed he flashed children
• Watch 2,000 years of drag in one four-minute musical number
• The Rocky Horror Picture Show and four decades of queer sci fi punk
