Queering Kansas City Jazz by Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone

Author:Amber R. Clifford-Napoleone [Clifford-Napoleone, Amber R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC012000 Social Science / Gay Studies, SOC017000 Social Science / Lesbian Studies, HIS036090 History / United States / State & Local / Midwest (ia, Il, In, Ks, Mi, Mn, Mo, Nd, Ne, Oh, Sd, Wi), SOC028000 Social Science / Women's Studies
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press

As mentioned earlier, perhaps the first recorded female impersonator performance in Kansas City, however, was reported in the Kansas City Star in 1880. “As a female impersonator he draws a large salary and is a most remarkable success,” wrote the reporter in his article “Strange Men,” “but as a man he is a gigantic failure and not worth the powder that would blow his effeminate soul to heaven.”96 As Kristina Straub demonstrated, the representation of female impersonators as “failed men” was clearly connected to the discursive formation of masculinity. The very concept that these biological males were “failed men” acted as a mirror on masculinity, that both spatially and discursively identified such performers as feminine in appearance and therefore perhaps in desire.97 Indeed this mirror was also part of the marketability of gender impersonation. According to City Ordinance No. 291 public cross-dressing was illegal, but no attempt was made to halt the performance recorded in 1880. In fact Kansas City’s reputation as a “wide-open town” was predicated on the fact that any of the performances listed in Code 291 were perfectly allowed in certain spaces and as nighttime entertainment.

The representation of female impersonators as failed men, indeed as failed women, appears again in a report in the Kansas City Star in 1927. In the anonymous report titled “‘Sissies’ Brought In by Rude Police; Fined $500 Each by Judge,” the author represented impersonators as feminine and hypersexual:

“It was just too terrible, my dear!” “The rude police have no sense of propriety,” let the “sissies” of the city tell it. When officers of the law raided a cabaret at 1520 East Twelfth street early yesterday morning, terror and consternation spread from manly breast to manly breast underneath the frilly garments of the feminine sex, worn for the evening’s pleasure.

When the last screams and squeals had coyly come forth from throats originally designed for some he-occupation like calling hogs, the police had seven men—six were all clad in dainty chiffon things, cute little pumps, silk hose and other frills.

Yesterday morning the sight of six men in flimsy clothing evidently had a bad effect on Judge Carlin P. Smith because he fined each of the frequenters $500 each and also fined Ben Payne, the proprietor of the place, $500. They are the heaviest fines ever assessed against frequenters of a cabaret.98

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